FINALLY, upgrading my engine to openGL 4. I was having some trouble so I started with a stripped down application and was wondering if VAO's are required, because I have a sample working, but if I remove the VAO then it doesn't seem to like drawing my triangle.

Yes. On all "core" profiles, since they've been introduced (OpenGL 3.2), you can't draw without a VAO.

Something that might save you a lot of trouble is just create a single VAO at the initialization and never touch it again. Since you were using older OpenGL version (or compatibility), you probably have a setup for managing attributes (which is the purpose of VAOs), and you can use your own instead of converting everything. Plus, managing by yourself makes easier to integrate to your renderer.