finally got it to work. The problem was I had the ENCODER, not the DECODER... sheesh.
anyway, yep, going straight to .cdg wouldn't work... it looked like it, but the file size was totally wrong. So I did what m'man Ozzie said and converted to .rw files.
Since I don't have the microsoft .net program, and don't WANT it, the renamer123 program won't install. Instead, I went into a MS-DOS command window, changed the directory to my folder, and did a simple rename of all .rw files to .cdg !
!
> ren *.rw *.cdg
Worked like a charm. I then renamed the files thru my kjpro utility "renamer", and using mp3toolz (an older beta version without the microsoft .net framework), zipped the files.
Thanks again guys!