Thanks for the reply Mihnea. I moved the 1.1 plug-in out and the new plug-in in and found it (them). It all works really nice now (for a from-scratch scene). Very zippy and cool! Like a Lamborghini!
Another question: For my scene that I was rendering in 1.1, when it's loading in the 1.5 set-up in it says for the objects that it can't find the MaxwellRender shader handler and fails the M~R "shader" load. Does this mean that for all 1.1 objects we'll have load them in and let the old shader settings do a "load fail" then go into the Surface editor and load their MW material settings manually from the .mxm flies they were linked to before? Not complaining at the thought, just wondering.
To be honest, I liked the old way (linking objects to .mxm files via shaders) but I'm sure there were some weaknesses involved with that route that I'm just not remembering now. If you could provide a few words or a link to such that explains the strengths of doing it this way over the previous way that would be swell. I just want to wrap my head around this as best as I can since we don't have docs yet. ... Edit: It has to do with texture mapping, doesn't it? This way you can carefully control how the mapping happens via playing by LW's specific rules whereas you can't do that using the MxEd. At least that's my best guess at trying to answer my own question.