Thanks to all!
Being a begginner, I thought that simply making a rolling ball would be a nice easy thing to start learning programming games with ... but either Ive chosen something slightly harder than expected, or programming 3D games in general is a lot more complicated than I expected! especially considering Im not very mathematical!

I'll now check out fproto's metroid Prime ball code (which, if its like the game, should be exactly what I want), and also info on matrix rotation stuff.

Thanks again.

p.s Can anyone reccomend any good tutorials to do (ive started off on some at andypike.com, but I dunno if there's any other excellent ones to do next), or alternatively, is trying to make my own games a better way to learn?

Thanks to Fproto for your ball, but unfortunatly I get the message 'Failed to set up Direct3D'. Similarly, when I try to use some example code that comes with the directX SDK, I get messages such as "The reference rendering device was selected, but your computer only has a reduced functionality reference device installed. Install the DirectX SDK to get the fill reference device". Are these errors related? IS the SDK ive got not installed properly? Could it be to do with my Graphics card not being good enough?

Incidently Fproto, could I see the code for that ball? Thanks.

And On a seperate topic - StephenB, (or anyone else who knows), How did you rotate your sphere using D3DXMatrixRotationAxis? As I asked at the start of this thread, what do I put in the vector to make it work?

Thanks