I am not sure what you are doing wrong... I don't have any problems with using dynamic cloth. My only real problem is I wasn't sure how to animate it. After a few passes in the cloth room, I have it down. Now I just need to get my head around lighting, and try to find bagginsbill's rendering settings...

I want a high quality render, but I don't want to spend 3 days waiting for it. Especially since I am using a laptop and not my home pc for this stuff.

If I had a nickle for ever time a woman told me to get lost, I could buy Manhattan.