I have a mesh that I imported from another source, messed around with, and eventually got to be compatible with Skyrim.

It is a canine of sorts, so I just basically made a new race with a new skin and armor addon that matched my new mesh. Other than that, the race is a wolf. The only problem I'm having is, while the thing moves around, the mesh itself is static. In other words, the thing translates, but it doesn't have any moving parts.

Does anyone know anything about how meshes and skeletons are matched up? I can see that the wolf mesh is nothing more than a trishape, so I can't figure out how this works. Also, the fox and wolf both operate off of the same skeleton, so I guess things with different shapes can use the same skeleton just fine. This is confusing.
EDIT: Apparently testwolf is a bad example. Looking at a fox, they have a bunch of nodes referenced to each part of the body. I'm willing to bet that the name of these nodes is referenced by the .hkx file for relative positional movement. Ergo I need to copy all of these nodes in and adjust their positions. I think.

you have to rig the model, that is not something that can be explained in a post. you should look up rigging for animation using either 3ds max or blender. and its not something you can learn overnight (at least if you want the model to turn out nice)

Oh lord. Bring on the learning.

Hmmm. Well, I really don't want to make an entire canine skeleton from scratch, seeing as how skyrim already has a perfectly good one. All i need to know how to do is somehow combine the canidskeleton.nif with the nif I have right now. Does anyone have any ideas on how to integrate two nifs (one of them a skeleton) in Blender?
So far my problem is that Blender won't open the darn skeleton. Gives me a "string too long" error.

EDIT: Fixed that, turns out it was my version number (the 12/11 one).
Now I can't get my mesh to go over the skeleton. Keeps saying about how the nif doesn't have an armature called 'skeleton.nif' whatever that means.

In a nutshell;

1. Open your creature body mesh in Blender. In Object mode, select all.
2. Import the skeleton.nif over top, using option "Import Skeleton Only + Parent Selected"
3. Make sure the body mesh fits the skeleton. Tip: Do not move the skeleton at all, move/edit the body.
4. Weightpaint.

The current problem all us Blender users face is you cannot export from Blender into a Skyrim nif format. What you'll need to do is follow some kind of F03 Blender rigging tutorial, export as F03 format then convert. There's a http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=3790 that should help with that.

At that point, create a folder with your body and skeleton meshes, and all the associated animation files.

That is the part I was confused about, thank you.

EDIT: When I scaled my mesh to match the skeleton, apparently I screwed something up because now it won't export due to its being "non uniformally scaled". I cant apply the rotation stuff because it has multi-user data, whatever that means. Ideas?

I'm also trying to get a hang of the rest of my process even with an imperfectly matched skeleton. I have it in NifSkope, but unfortunately two things are going on: 1) my stencil properties won't delete 2) I can't seem to get the conversion to go to BSLightingShaderProperty

In the Links and Pipeline tab, right beside the material box, is a small box with a number, indicating the number of users of that material. Click it to make it single user.

I've seen the same issues in the comments of that tutorial I linked about the BSLightingShaderProperty with no solution. You could try copying a branch from another creature and editing? I've also never heard of a stencil property not deleting... is there an error message or anything?

No error message. The unfortunate part about the whole BSlightingShaderProperty thing is that by converting the node or deleting it, I kill off the UV Map. So...I dunno.