Using texture handles

I'm having one heck of time here, getting a custom texture to load on demand. It consistently fails the sanity check. So, I try to brute force it to load, and then again test it. It will still fail.

if (texHandle.isValid()) {
....
} else {
texHandle.set(pathName, &GFXDefaultStaticDiffuseProfile))
if (texHandle.isValid())
....
}

Thats basically what I'm doing. Any blatant errors? What exactly makes it valid, other than its indexed?