here is an option for you. If you get Fragmotion, it imports .x files with animation, and exports them as Milkshape3d files. then you can open it in milkshape and have animations already intact without haveing to reassighn all the vertecies. Mikshape and fragmotion are great together as companion programs. I personally find it much easier to model in milkshape and do all my reorienting and importing / exporting to milkshape in Fragmotion. If not you can do it the way you wanted to go about it by importing the unanimated.x useing the import tools, saveing it as an .ms3d file, reopen the new .ms3d file and 'merge' the skeleton wich should be in .ms3d format. Merging can only be done with an .ms3d file. Hope that helped a bit.
