Help with STL export inport setings

Hey guys I need some advice.

I'm having a problem exporting my nice smooth surfaces to an STL that looks the same ( it comes out faceted because of the resolution of the mesh size).

The only export controll I have is min and max triangle length. Default is 50mm max and 0.01mm min which gives you big chunky octagonal sides in small holes. Exporting as a 1mm max helps but you still get some facets on tight radii and it has the down side of making your file size a lot bigger. Of course I could go down to a 0.5mm or 0.1mm max but that's a 10fold increase in polys (no bueno).
I also have no local mesh controll wich would be good.
Does anyone have any freeware they recomend to fix this problem??
Any advice would be helpfull!!
-Thanks, Nick

Edit- I found a setting burried deep in a menu that let's me manually control the "max parting" which is the maximum distance the STL surface can vary from your solid model. Default was 0.1 which is why stuff was coming out chunky. Changing to 0.005 gives great increase in resolution but bumps the file size a little. I would still like advice on alternatives though!!

You could try the remeshing filters in meshlab if number of triangles got too high. If it is just the file size that is bothering you, you can zip it for upload, or
use netfabb studio basic to convert it to binary stl format if it is currently in human-readable ascii text stl format. (Or choose a supported format that has less redundancy than stl - in stl, all mesh point coordinates are written out for each triangle even if they are shared between adjacent ones)