Importing a 3ds file exported from Lightwave crashes Unity. 
Holy… What is wrong with that program?
I’ve imported 3DS from Blender, Max, Bryce just fine…
Also Cheetah, Silo too.
Have you tried something simple, like a plain cube or sphere? Also, I’m not sure if it matters, but is it a primitive or a regular mesh? I crashed unity with an fbx from Cinema 4D, but it was because of how it was set up, I later imported one with no problem, and haven’t had a problem since. May be similar.
Just to make sure: You are remembering to file bugs on these issues (and including the fbx files)…
Since we use Alias’ code to load fbx files, there’s probably some we can’t fix - but then at least we can bitch about it to alias, and some of the bugs are probably ours as well…