For a while now, SimPE and I have just had to agree to disagree about whether or not I have Managed DirectX installed. I haven't figured out how to slap any sense into it, so I tried to make do without it. But its getting annoying, and now that I've finally made an account here I thought it'd be smart to try to overcome my shyness and ask the pros here. 

I've googled and searched to no avail--I just get threads of people not realizing Managed DirectX and regular DirectX are separate and thus they skipped installing it. That's definitely not my problem--I downloaded MDX directly from the SimPE website. And installed it, uninstalled it, reinstalled it, rebooted, tried a different install location of SimPE... and still, when I try to view a GMDC file, it gives me the "you don't have MDX!" popup message. What am I missing? Am I being unbelievably dense? Is MDX really, really picky about how its installed and has to be done with nothing else open and with reboots before and after and with a magic ritual performed during boot, even though the install dialogues say nothing of the sort? Is it outdated? Is it because I'm on Windows 7, or 64bit, and its not designed for my system, even though I can't find anywhere that says this or anyone else with similar problems? Do I need to tell SimPE where to find it?

I figure I must have just missed something, or made a mistake somewhere I'm not even considering, but nonetheless I'm at a loss. Does anyone know what might be wrong and how to fix it?

Yeah, I figured that'd be the case, otherwise I would've surely found something about it somewhere. Thank you for clarifying! Rules out one possibility for sure. And I hope so too--the truth is out there somewhere!

ETA--well, I found a workaround at least! I have this little notebook laptop that would crap itself at the very idea of running Sims, but installing SimPE and MDX on it at least enabled it to view, extract, export and import meshes as long as I get the .package file from my main computer. Obviously has its limits because it doesn't have the game files, but... it got me that hair mesh I was wanting to try to convert, so it's good enough for now! I'm still open to ideas for how to fix it on my main comp, of course.

Now I just have the problem of trying to get Sims, Milkshape and Blender to play nice together. (Blender exporting to Milkshape left me with renumbered joints and exporting from Milkshape to Sims left me with a whole new definition of "hairy arms" when I tested the hair in BS... O.o) Hopefully my stroke of luck in finding a workaround continues or strikes again for this.