Thanks a lot Mike and Dominique!
So Dominique's example is pretty much exactly what I needed... thanks for pointing out your "Yet Another Interactive Samples" page. I like making both the buffers and proximity check client side, that is great!
After implementing this I have one more issue... our map is in geographic coordinates (WGS_84)(we haven�??t moved to the projected Web Mercator because the newer ESRI and Bing base map services are missing tiles at lower resolutions in some areas we need). So the problem is that the buffers are off in the vertical/latitude direction... any easy way to implement this? Or would that be some ugly calculations based off the coordinate system? I got it working using the buffer geometry service and they come back correct, I am ok with this, though the client side buffers are nifty... so visually they are correct�?� but correct me if I�??m wrong, the distance calculations are slightly off, is this correct?
Thanks again!