yah, after i posted the first post, i quit searching and started browsing and figured out just what mo3 is, hence, the nm in my second post
the command line for lame was correct, i copied and pasted into a dos box and it worked just fine (of course replacing the variables with values) and i was running with lame in the same directory... i never figured out what the problem was but it doesnt matter since i cant do what i was trying to do anyway :p