Dear Bagginsbill and Acadia:
wow, thanks for all the effort you two put into resolving this issue. I'll certainly give it a whorl in the future. Acadia, very kind regards for the very detailed answer that kicked this off. I really appreciate that you took the time to answer my question in line by line detail. These seems like a great method to gain control of background images. It's this type of effort that really makes me appreciate the great community here at Renderosity.

Bagginsbill, despite my bit of a blow off on you it turns out that you did address the nub of my question. When I doubled checked my render settings I realized that at some point in time I had set my default to always render to screen size. When I switched it off I got the background image to load. Thank you so much because it allowed me to easily load up a background to finish off a picture that I hope to load tonight, one that I had about given up on.

Again, thanks to both of you for going beyond the call.