Load material settings rather than whole new material?

One thing that’s always annoyed me about Max is that you can’t load material settings into a material, you can only really load a whole new material (when dealing with presets/saved mat files). So if that material is present on several items and in several multi-mats, you bust the links and have to go through and re-assign that now new material to everything. Is anyone aware of a script or way of loading settings into the existing material?

I think there’s a script on scriptspot that allows you to select all items with a given shader. Then you would just apply the new shader to the selected.

You can already do that within Max itself, but it doesn’t help you if they’re using multi-mats!

with this one it can be really simple
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=6&t=500501