hey,
Thank you so much for taking your time to look at this problem. I have fought this for a long time however it IS possible that I'm just doing something stupid. here is the link to a project I made specifically for you to examine:
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=PH9H8KMY

whats in it:
the program is inside, run it and press 0 and move the camera.
what you should see:
there should be 4 quadrants: the upper left is the light1 render target (see code for details)
the lower left is the camera color render target
the upper right is the camera scene normals render target
the lower right is the camera scene depth render target

to experience my problem, toggle between the k and l keys to switch the stages. When you press l, the right two render targets should become blank. This is because the stages are switched so that the light1 view renders AFTER the camera and seems to override/erase the render targets (the fx file does NOT write to any other semantic other than COLOR0).

I forgot to upload the source: mrt_test.c I'll do this in a sec - thank you very much!


http://www.groundtacticsgame.com/
Alienware m17x R Custom laptop
specs:
Intel Core 2 Extreme Quad CPU Q9300
2x Nvidia 280GTX 2GB vram
6GB ddr3 memory@ 1333Mhz
512GB SSD
1200p 17' screen
runs Crysis Warhead on max settings at 1200p at 90 fps