Trouble getting World Editor to render

So I'm trying to get a very basic app setup with just the bare bones of a main menu and the gui/world editors funcitoning. I followed the MiniApp 1-4 steps and have done some poking around on my own and I have the gui editor working perfectly, and I now have the world-editor loading up fine, however, it doesn't want to render. The gui for it comes in, and the script output looks like the level is running in the editor, but all I see where the viewport should be is my main menu gui and flashing cursors all over (basically it's not clearing that viewport and isn't writing anything to it, so if the cursor passes over it leaves itself behind like the old "You Win" screen in windows 3.1 solitaire). Anyway, I'm stumped, and I know this is really general without any code examples (since I can't figure out what's failing to save my life) but hopefully someone else had this problem. If I copy the torque demo project into my project it works just fine, so my main structure (common and creator) must be working okay, I just can't figure out what the critical difference between my project and the demo are. Any ideas?