Without actually importing tons of characters. And without having to duplicate a character 1000 times cause that would cause problems. Or can i actually use the echo system and create 1000's of people without running into memory problems? I have a feeling i can't. so how do you create crowds

Ecos should work just fine, as when they are created they are just billboards. 

Yes you can do this with an EcoSystem in Vue 5 Infinite.

In short (without lots of fine tuning):

1. Load in each of the characters you want to use.
2. Save them as a Vob file (Vue's own object format)
3. Create an EcoSystem with the characters.
4. Populate the EcoSystem.
5. Render

You'll probably want to use low resolution figures with low resolution or procedural textures (but then if a figure is in the distant background and is 10 pixels high why waste resources on a dozen 4000x4000 texture maps?)

Hope that points you in the right direction.

Thanks all . My next questio would be, what if i want them all to face the same direction. As in people walking in a side walk.

There is a tutorial on doing that somewhere.  Sorry I can't find the link.  Hopefully someone will point you in the right direction so you can do the same for your people.

You can use the 'scale and orientation' tab in the ecosystem set up area.
To get the people to stay on the sidewalk you can use a map to drive their placement.  I think there are some tuts here about it.

here's a similar one about paths.
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/tutorial/index.php?tutorial_id=291