For those of you not following current events, BrigadierWolf modeled and textured a very nice marine model here, it just needs to be animated. The Thing then converted Brig's .obj to a nice textured .smd, and posted that later on in the thread. A model clean deletes the duplicate polies, bringing it down to about 4500 from 9000.

However, studiomdl.exe still can't compile that model 'cause it's still 2500 verts or so, and studiomdl will only handle up to 2048 verts. No one else seems to be having this problem, so what am I doing wrong?

if you cant compile cause its too highpoly then delete half the model and export what you have left as "a". Then undo and delete the part that you exported already. Then export what you first deleted as "b". Then in the qc file have it say
$body "ref" "a"
$body "ref" "b"
Its better to try to use groups.

Yea cut it up in diffrent .smd's.