Welcome on board Tigerboy,
You'll notice that Pete and Shannon take extra care checking the sets before sending them out to collectors: see the list of casualties in a post in the 'buy & sell' section. (Some good value there too). I suppose its not many in terms of the percentage of sets going through but I suppose that it might show that if the elastic bands snap there's always the potential for figures to move around/against each other and cause some paint loss.
On the dragoons? Well I had a few Grenada and and a few Arsynev Napoleonics (I don't really bother with Niena). According to Valeri Malyguine (Valmaly on eBay), and the husband and wife team of Boris Kolymstev and Olga Romantchuk (kolobob and solderss on eBay), they contend that the mounted figures have special steel reinforcement pins in the legs. With one or two exceptions in K&C's "The West" series, you'd have to say that usually K&C have kept the poses for the mounted figures as being the more traditional 4-legs-on-the-ground type. With all the new innovation and dramatic poses in their recent sets there is always the possibilty that those handling them for packing have inadvertenly bent legs slightly on occasion and thus possibly destabilised some figures. Not an issue in the inherent quality of the piece, more to do about the handling. I think I read somewhere that the newer releases are now following the St Petersburg studio example of special reinforcement on certain mounted Napoleonic poses. So don't ahve any worries about the overall quality of K&C, and don't be discouraged to let your dealer know: they are the 'guardians' of K&C's reputation too, and they can't do anything for you if they haven't heard about it.
