alright, i looked into it. sure, it looks easier, and the sdk docs didn't even mention exec buffers. but it seems to be just drawing primitives one by one, unless i missed something. Wouldn't that be slower? oh and, anybody else using exec buffers except me here (for the moment i'm just trying to)?

You can draw upto 65536 triangles with a single call to DrawPrimitive(), it's not a single triangle at a time.

Noone uses execute buffers anymore.

Execute buffers are pre-DX5. You can still use them with the old interfaces, but you get none of the newer features available, like multi-texturing, hardware transformation and lighting, etc.