Okay, I feel like what I am trying to do is so easy that I'm actually over thinking it. I have and simple cube and I want to keep all the hard edges (no beveling) but i want the corners to be rounded. Imagine taking a perfect square block of wood with sharp edges and taking sand paper and just rounding the corners, not the edges. How do i do this!!!
Use the mentalray mia_roundcorners node and put it in the bumpmap slot of your object, and then give the roundcorners node an amount of "radius". The only problem with this is that you will then need to render in mentalray.
Oh just corners.. nvm hmm perhaps extract the corner and bevel it, and then merge the verts back so that it gos from your bezel edges, into just a single edge.
Edit Mesh=Chamfer vertex. By your description this would be the most straight forward tool however be prepared for mixed results. The more edges you have per vert and the rounder you want the result to be the more unwieldy your model will get. Use with caution.
NOTE: this tool, like bevel, is UV destructive. It will create a void in your UVs when you use it. You will have to re-project the new faces to fit them back into your UV maps as well as do edge flow touch ups. This tool only creates parameter edges connecting the new verts so if you click recklessly you could easily end up with a 35 sided polygon.