does anyone have any experience of setting up the Half life 2 export plug-in for maya 2008?

I was going to export my files from maya to xsi, and then export as an smd from there, which worked once, but now i get an unspecified failure when i try exactly the same procedure again. I thought it would be easier if i could just export straight out of maya. Im not very hot though when it comes to knowing where to place things in path destinations and editing command lines and such, which it seems there is a bit of with the hl2 maya plug-in. was hoping someone on here might of done it in the past and be able to help me through it. It took me about 2 weeks to get the studio compiler for source open, and alot of brain frazzling...