I asked in the blender IRC about this and they concluded that the importer was broken and that I needed to get a plugin (or learn python). However; I was unable to find a plugin that would do the trick - so I am asking here.
I am running windows xp pro 64 with and AMD 64 dual core processor. I’ve installed blenderx64 2.49 and python 2.6.3 for AMD 64.
I am working with the shiva game engine and they supply an exporter for collada - however I am having trouble importing collada .dae shapes.
If, by “shapes”, you mean only edges (no faces), I’ve had the same problem importing from Sketchup. IIRC, even the plain edges imported properly, once I added faces to most of the edges. Perhaps you could try the same.
Also, the Collada importer development seems to have stopped. OTOH, there is the GSoC work being done on Collada support.
Hope this helps.
(BTW - I hope you are not asking about importing Collada in Shiva. In which case, I have no idea, sorry.)
Can you post a stripped-down file here?
I don’t use ShiVa, but , recently, I’m doing quite a bit of importing Sketchup (Free) collada export. Once or twice, when I tried exporting only edges (Plans - I thought it would be better to do all the modelling in Blender), Blender only gave me a file full of empties.
I recently had this problem importing from makehuman. I found that the old version 1.4 of the importer script did the trick (I have a similar setup to yours)