i followed the hand setup on blenderchar.com and when i was finished and moved the bones in pose mode and the bones would move perfectly but the arm mesh would not go with it. are there any troubleshooting tips that any of u know that could fix this.
no, that makes complete sense
the mesh must be the child [of the armature, not the object. you get to choose when parenting. if you already have vertex groups choose to not create vertex groups.] of your armature
and it must have vertex groups. I don’t think the blenderman tut goes into much detail on how to make them, but it does go into some
the groups must have EXACTLY the same name as the bone they correspond to
thanks a lot i just parented the wrong thing. its better now. again thanks 
… umm
okay, can you upload your .blend file somewhere so we can look at it?
As others have noted, if you move the bones of an armature but point(s) on the associated mesh do not move as you expect, it’s because Blender hasn’t been told which vertices (points…) on the mesh should be influenced by such-and-such a bone. That’s the essential idea behind vertex-groups: they are named groups of vertices upon the mesh, that are to be influenced by a bone.
The actual implementation is a little fancier, in that you can use “weights” to say how much influence a bone has, but the essential idea is unchanged.
i fixed it know. if u want to see it ull have to tell me how cause i dont know how to upload a file off of my comp onto a forum. i do however know how to take the file off the internet and onto the forum. but that doesnt matter cause the .blend file is on my comp. how do i get it on the forum from my comp?