OK gentlemen

I am my own hero 

Apparently Scenery Shortcut with Vista differs substantially than from XP... all of the videos and readme file is geared for XP users.

When you use the scenery shortcut program to create the .bgl file, the program indicates that it saved the .bgl file in your FSX add on scenery folder, when in fact it saves it in User\Documents\Flight Simulator X

the trick is to move the .bgl file from this documents location into the correct addon scenery folder in the FSX directory

it took me FOREVER to figure out what i was doing wrong... which was basically following the instructions "to the t" when i should have been thinking outside the box considering the fact that im using vista and not XP

maybe this will help someone else?