Can you download from the link provided in the first post? It's a direct link, and will give you a compression of two rigs... obviously the one called Ninja(?) is the one.

If you can, you could very easily use that as a reference for my problem as I think I started by trying to texture the original file without manipulating the rig. Then when that didn't work right away I saved a copy to manipulate anything I wanted.. this way I had a clean original file when I found the solution.

I'll try your OBJ solution though. Worth a shot at this point. Thank you!