that's my question, do maya 7.0 files work with 6.0? basically just the .mb file and stuff, nothing crazy or anything, all im doing is making a project and a mesh for school and right now im doing it on 7.0 and school has 6.0, and i need to get it into the school's 6.0 eventually to work with. any help would be appreciated.

In short, no. 6.5 files were largely backwards compatible by going in and manually changing some stuff in the file, but 7.0 files are not. If you're simply doing modeling then just export to .obj. Otherwise, you're crap out of luck.

I can't actually test this, lacking a copy of Maya 6.0, but when I was in a course using Maya, one of the guys in my class ran 6.0 at home, and I'm mostly certain he said he took his work from school and could bring it to home, with a tweak on the version number in the file - so long as it didnt have any new neat Maya 7 stuff in the model.

But, as I said, I can't test that, so I could be very mistaken, as zer0wolf's post leads me to consider.

Xanin, what you describe was what zer0wolf was referring to. For example, I have version 6.0 at home but I'm using 6.5 at work. So if I want to take stuff home to work on it I simply save as a ma file rather than a mb file then edit the ascii file in notepad to change all version number headers from 6.5 to 6.0. However, zer0wolf is right. Going from 7 back to previous versions no longer works, at least not in the situations that I've tried.