How to distribute animated meshes with a particle system I'm pretty new with particles and everything, so I'm going to guess that there's got to be some easy way to do this, but I just can't seem to find it. 

I have a forest scene that I've made by distributing trees, bushes, grass, etc. across a landscape randomly with a hair particle system. It worked great and I got a good render out of it. But now I've re-built each source mesh so that it has an armature and a "swaying in the wind" animation (with the sapling generator). and I want to sub in the animated ones for the static meshes. Previously, I had grouped the source meshes and then under the render tab in my particles panel I just hit "group" and selected the group and voila. But if I group the animated meshes and do the same, the armatures don't get distributed with them and they don't animate. If I include the armatures in the group it distributes them as separate objects, and again i get no animation (plus a lot of loose armatures all over the scene). How can I get it to distribute copies of the source objects with ​their armatures attached?
I got it to duplicate the animated mesh. I did not have to instance the armatures with the mesh. At first, it wasn't working for me either. It only duplicates the animated mesh if the original animated meshes are visible in the scene. I presume you have them in a separate layer. Try making that layer visible.

This seems like a workaround though. It would be nice to have the original objects invisible. Maybe you should file a bug report for this?