Tutorial - How to create a world using Real-World Height data

Has anyone successfully created a height map using Google Earth from this tutorial yet? If not, this needs to be removed from the FAQ because there is very little help with this topic. I've been trying for days to figure out how to get past getting SRTM to work with the current version of Google Earth on a 64-bit OS to no success whatsoever. Very frustrated. I'll keep messing with it, and if I'm successfully I'll update this tutorial, but I doubt this the help I need will be found here as this thread is dead.