Kryo and everybody: just a follow up on my post above. I DID get the mod running. If you have Vista and are having trouble, this is what I did that worked...
Vista was not letting the batch file run- it "looked" like it ran (with the old "DOS window" pop-up), but it really wasn't. I finally figured out that the "user account control" wasn't letting the bat file run, so I turned it off (I would suggest for security purposes disconnecting from any network while doing this), ran the batch file, then turned "user account control" back on. Went into the game and there was the mod.