Ok, I looked up the material struct in A7 and the d3deffect was indeed at a different position there. Only in A8 it got a fixed position and was documented. In the last A7 version, d3deffect was 8 bytes after its current position in A8. It could have been at other positions in different A7 versions.
As to the ENABLE_VIEW issue, I tested your sample, but the problem does not happen in A8. So it was indeed something A7 specific.
As to the entskin problem, I believe they must be really entity skins. For arbitrary images, either define a _bmap texture in the shader:
http://manual.3dgamestudio.net/Shader-bmap.htmor use a self-defined texture when you set up effect parameters anyway.
