Are you doing your UVs by hand or just let Max auto-unwrap during the baking process?

If you are using Max to auto-unwrap...why not just have Melody go ahead and do its thing (with messing up your UVs and creating its own) then bring that model back into Max and bake (while disabling the auto-unwrap in Max's Texture Bake).

Just a thought...

I was going to try that out myself (and maybe see if I couldn't figure out the problem you were having specifically...as I don't recall it myself) but my Laptop doesn't support the needed shader version - and I haven't bothered to set my computers back up yet...maybe I'll play abit with it tonight.