Looks like a problem with animation. I think some of those were recently fixed… are you using the 0.9 release or CVS/nightly?
I use 0.9 - I dowloaded it about a week ago.
I don't believe there is any animation because one model is of a friend who exported the model from Cinema 4D and the other is from the source I gave you. I also tried a simple box created with Cinema and exported as 3ds and that works excellent.
Had the same issue. A friend made a model in cinema and exported it in 3ds. But didnt work in JME, because of (if i remember correctly) this exception.
Then i imported the 3ds into Max and resaved it then it was possible to import with jme.
The difference of both 3ds (cinema vs max) was about 16 Bytes or so…
I think it's because the 3ds exporter of cinema is outdated.
So… try that, or switch to a nighlty build or CVS. 0.9 is pretty old right now (regardless of when you downloaded it)
How can I use the CVS system? And how does it work? I downloaded my current JME from the "nightly build" section. So it shouldn't be very old, should it?
No it shouldn't be old then. Also the fixes I mentioned should be in there already, so you must have another problem then… 
I downloaded an Eclipse plugin from this forum which can convert the jme-supported formats to .jme-files. With that I get a model into the game without any exception. But the textures aren't used - is there a way to do so or do I have to paint them onto the model with Java and JME (–> TextureManager)
Did you specify the texture path/url correctly when you set up the binary loader? Textures should work.