I have had no luck getting the buffer tool to accept anything but degrees as units of measure.

I have found lots of stuff saying the layer needs to be reprojected and saved but it hasn't worked at all for me.

Is there a way I could create a buffer without using ftools or at least force the units to meters somehow?

As a workaround I converted meters to degrees (lat) and used that but the final product needs to be as close to reality as possible.

Things I've tried:

• setting every unit option I could find to meters (where possible).
• setting everything to NAD83/Maryland (data is for Washington, DC) and saving it as such (as layers in ESRI shape files).
• reimporting the reprojected layers
• setting relevant layers to Google Mercator

The was tried followed by creating a buffer. Many were tried in combination. QGIS 1.7.3 Slackware64 current (qgis from SBo-13.37 repo, tried on multilib and plain 64it with same results)