I checked the swash plate and the top part with the plastic balls and it spins freely from the bottom half that is operated by the servos.

If you have not checked this, try: the lower rotor head pins can be sheared off and hard to detect. If you remove the lower blades, you will see if the plastic pins that the blades slide on to are broken.

I dunno, just a thought if you have tried everything else.

* Also, the 4 in 1 needs to be upright and straight, so it seems. For the gyro, I guess. I have laid mine sideways before and it made the heli act weird.

That don't sound right. The swash plate upper half should move when you move the servos. The upper part where the ball links attach to is what moves the lower part of the swash plate, creating froward/reverse and left/right moition of the lower blades. I never had a swash plate problem but it sure sounds like thats what you have going wrong.

Well I did some work on the CX2 when I got home, I think I narrowed the problem down to the servos.

I'm sure this was mentioned before, but I am pretty sure that the problem is with your servos. I tried moving my servo arms out the other day in order to obtain more response from my heli. (by the way, I'm pretty new to this hobby too) I found that I had the same problem with the heli wanting to tip over and I had to hold the stidk all the way over to just keep it level with full trim. I moved the arms back and am still fine tweaking it to get it back to where it will hover all by itself. Check if the arms are set all the way to the inside holes and go from there.