Yeah - it tells me that you don't have a back buffer.

And how is he rendering it without a backbuffer? ;)

I can't be sure from the screenshot, but it seems to me that the face culling order could be wrong... try changing your front face setting from clockwise to counter clockwise, or biseversa

The culling order seems to be fine IMHO, the mesh would look much worse otherwise.

When I add a depth stencil view to the device nothing is rendered at all! Why would this be?

When I look at that image it looks wider and the hands are down. its the wrong image for that object.

When I add a depth stencil view to the device nothing is rendered at all! Why would this be?

Are you clearing your depth/stencil buffer after you add it before drawing the mesh. Also are you setting an DepthStencilState as well. It would be good to see some code

to see exactly how you are setting it up