Found another error in the importer and it's due to the change I made to using a linked list. Fixed that.
Now here's the real question: In the importer I ignore the normals read in from the obj files. Should I keep ignoring them or should I use them?
Here's what I decided to do: If the obj file contains normals then I use them. If it doesn't then I use the existing vertex normal data.
Now I really just had a what the heck was I thinking moment. Looking over the importer code I totally ignore the texture coordinate data read in (I use the existing vertex data). On top of that my error checking for what was read in from the file was happening after I tried to set the new vertex data! What was I thinking? I really must have been tired when I coded this...