Simply put, HOW DO I USE THEM?

I've downloaded a large number of them but can't for the life of me figure out how to use them.
And I know nothing about NODES to make my own Deformed textures.

I'm refuring to the textures from http://mxmgallery.maxwellrender.com/

From what I've seen, Maxwell is a proprietary extension that works with the SolidWorks CAD program. Maxwell is essentially a rendering test-bed to quickly compare how materials look on SolidWorks objects. From what I gather from the vids, it works somether like this: Maxwell is opened with a standard scene of what look to be SolidWorks objects. Maxwell materials are dragged and dropped onto the objects in the scene. The scene is adjusted for lighting and rendered. It's kind of neat because the finished render can be adjusted for lighting afterwards in realtime.

I don't know if there is an easy way Maxwell materials can be dissected and reconstructed for use in Blender, without, perhaps, using Solidworks, but I have my doubts.

You probably need Maxwell to use those files.  (BTW, Maxwell is a renderer that works with many 3d programs.  I believe the rendering algorithm used by Indigo is the same (Metropolis Light Transfer)).  Check out http://blenderartists.org/forum/archive/index.php/t-82945.html

If you don't have Maxwell, you might look for similar standalone renderers (Indigo, Kerkythea?) that may be able to read that file format.  I believe the information those renderers need is quite different for what Blender needs for the internal renderer, though, so it would need to be translated into something Blender understands (phong, blinn, etc.), at which point it's not really the same material and you may be better off with a blender material library.