I am responsible for a shot of hundreds of "Angel Oranges" (oranges with halos and white wings) ascending through the clouds into um, that great grove in the sky. I would like to animate a few oranges fluttering up in the foreground and then instance those few to fill the background (with the animation offset). I do not have a lot of experience with particles in Max (or any package for that matter). If anyone could offer me some pointers or suggestions on how to best pull this shot off, it would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

You could do this fairly painlessly by using a few different particle systems (SuperSpray or PCloud, etc) using Instanced Geometry. Unfortunately I think the standard particles are pretty week so I rely on Particle Studio. It has much better instancing controls and it's much more non-linear to work with being that it's event-driven. Of course if you don't have it, you can still get the job done out of the box. Just be careful with your materials. A simple error lots of people make with regards to orientation of instanced geometry is not using the "Direction of Travel" option in the Rotation rollout. This usually requires you to adjust the pivot point of the geometry (luckily you can do this in realtime and see your particles reorient themselves).