hey paul,
thanks for the quick reply. sorry, i realized after the fact that i should have thrown some screenshots or links in to illustrate my point.
i see that the standard interwiki links are running on your skin no problem. but, the interlanguage interwiki links i was referring to are the type that appear on the sidebar when implemented. from what i have read, and witnessed, they only appear when an interlanguage link is placed within the page, otherwise the "languages" section remains invisible.
to use the classic example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planktonat the bottom of the sidebar (beneath tools) is the "languages" section, which contains 50 interlanguage links, written into the page using the [[two-letter language code:page name]] format. the japanese, for example, being [[ja:プランクトン]], and being displayed in the sidebar as 日本語.
and, as i mentioned, a page without any interlanguage links in it would simply not display the "languages" section, such as:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arming_sword(actually took a few minutes to find one

)
on my wiki i have set the two letter language codes in the interwiki table, and using any default skin in the mediawiki package the interlanguage links work fine. unfortunately, in gumax i can't seem to get them to show up (tried vertical, horizontal, and drop-down).
any initial thoughts? thanks for your time.