I'm guessing you are aware of this but, just to make sure, using D3DLIGHT9 means vertex lighting. That in turn means that if you have low poly geometry the lighting will be *crap*.
Which is another of the reason why many games use lightmaps (until pixel shading came along :) ).
Games like UT for example use lightmaps (static and dynamic) for all lighting on the low poly map geometry, and vertex lighting for complex meshes, like the player models.

If you were aware of all this, then I'm sorry for wasting your time :)