Anything that is inside of PK3 files will not be visible in the material editor. The Tempest gamepack cannot read PK3 files. Discreet never made this functionality because they only wanted to create THE first GMAX gamepack as a proof of concept. So as long as it could work to show people it is possible to create gamepacks for GMAX, they never bothered to add PK3 reading functionalities. The only way for you to workaround this is to unzip all PK3 files inside your baseq2 folder.

The Flash toolbar not being visible in Flash-9 is a known problem. The only way to fix this would be to re-compile Tempest's toolbar under Flash-9. I have the source of it but am not allowed to distribute it. I have no Flash 9 compiler. Since no one was using Tempest anymore, I didn't bothered to have it compiled.

You can only open *.map files created by Tempest. You cannot open a *.map file created by another editor.

All these problem can be fixed by changing Tempest's code. I had started doing this but since it is a bit complicated to do + I have to re-learn C++  + no one was using Tempest anymore, then I simply stopped working on Tempest.

By the way, go visit the forum at Quake-3 MOD Urban Teror
They mentioned creating a whole map in 3d max and then exporting it as an ASE file to then be incorporated inside a Quake-3 map via the Q3MAP2 compile tool. Maybe the same can be applied to gmax ?