I finally understand the skinned mesh sample, but am still having trouble loading my .x exported meshes from 3ds max. They don't give me any errors, just don't load. The load great in the Mesh Viewer, so I know they work. Are there any samples in the SDK or on the internet that anyone knows that loads .x files all the way?

There has to be something happening instead of the file loading. If there's no error, does the program crash? Find the line that causes problems and post the code surounding it.

No, actually.. the program doesn't even crash. Basically, if I add textures or animation the model wont load, but the program will.. it will just be empty. I can't get textures to work, period (not even in mesh viewer), but that's another topic that I'll worry about later.. and animations work great in mesh viewer but cause the model to disapear in my app.
I'm using the skinned mesh parser sample from the sdk, which works great with tiny of course, but not so hot with my 3ds exports. Again, mesh viewer works great with my exports so there's gotta be some really exhaustive universal parser out there similar to what the ol' mesh viewer uses

Donn know about the new SDK, but old ones (DEC04 at least) have the source code for meshViewer. It's under sdk\Utilities\Source