I have been updating the code from this book to use the new SDK and I am stuck in chapter 7 (ragdoll animation). It seems that every chapter prior to 7 uses standard meshes from the DirectX SDK. Chapter 7's meshes seem to be created for the book. I get an E_FAIL return result from D3DXLoadSkinMeshFromXof (not really descriptive!) and it seems that this x file fails to load in the DXSDK mesh viewer. So, it would appear that the X file is bad. I am not sure how or why. I checked the number of curly braces and they seem to match. Has anyone else seen this problem?