Yeah, there were some uncalled 2danimations that were called but NEVER declared or whatever the UI error spits out.. and it was throwing me off track because it was spellgem stuff (bg, highlight, etc) that were dealing with a T.King interface.. I kept thinking wtf? This isn't even a T.King UI that I'm trying to mod. So I searched the EQUI_Animation files and still didn't see any references to "TK_SpellGemBackground" and such..
Then, as I was typing out this reply (which was of a different nature) I kinda put 2 and 2 together. If I can rename the file and use the original, then the animations must be defined and called in the hotbuttons file. ( Its so obvious now.) So I replaced everything that was pointing to the undeclared code and logged in, everything was working fine so I camped and started a different reply.
Thanks for pointing me back to that UI Error file Inokis. Can't believe how many times I looked at it and things just didn't click.