what about this?
If you need blurred reflections on an object without a lot of self reflections (the object reflection itself), then you can use the refract/reflect map.
Somewhere in the bottom part of the refract/reflect map you can choose to render out the map to 6 files, that way you can touch it up in Photoshop. You may want dummy (for the pick object button) replacing the object when you render out the maps, so the object itself isn't obstructing the view of the camera rendering the 6 maps.
Using the blur settings of the reflect refract map you can blur real nice (if I'm correct the blur settings are a percentage so 0.03 means 3% blur, so use small numbers).
Rendering out the reflection maps may seem like a crappy solution, but it actually creates very good results (and it's a lot faster sine the reflections are prerendered) so try it out!
One warning, rendering out those 6 maps can take a lot of time, and there is no way to interrupt the process, so save your files first in the case you want to kill Max if it takes to long.
Texture baking is indeed not a good idea (for an animation), since reflections depend on the angle you look at the object. When you change the angle, the reflection will move. For a single still it might work, I have never tried.
Most object work well with the reflection maps, especially when you do some tweaking in photoshop (since it's just a series of images, you can change them as you want).
If you cannot do without 'real' blurred reflections you could try to use the standard scanline renderer for blurred raytraced reflection, but the result will probably not be okay. The only solution you then have left is third party renderers with good soft reflection support. But try the reflection maps first, it'll save you a lot of rendertime when the results turn out to be good enough.
(By the way, for a long time Renderman didn't have real raytraced reflections, only reflection maps. You can see that they still did a lot of good stuff with it)
