I made a water ripple greyscale heightmap and exported it as an avi.  Is it possible to use this to animate the bump of an object?  I have tried and I can't get it to work.

Any ideas?  

If it is an image, saving it as an avi will result in a faulty file. Try opening it in winamp or whatever video player you use, chances are you'll get an error message.
You should simply load it into the bump channel, and animate the whole material in the advanced material editor.
Or create a second heighfield, and use this 2nd map at some point in your bump channel. If  you have already set up an animation, Vue will ask if you want to animate the transition between the two bump functions. Say yes, and the bumps will morph into one another.

Sorry.   I wasn't clear.   The avi heightmap is animated and 3 seconds long.  It has the water ripples and rebounds from the edges of the frame.  Because of the rebounds it would be difficult to animate this in the material editor.   Would it be possible to load the avi into the function editor as a color map added to the bump channel?

Thanks for your reply.

Worth a try, but if it fails, you could just re render your animated heighfield, but not as an avi, as an image sequence, and load that image sequence in the bump channel in the function editor, by using an animated texture node.

It works.  I forgot to load it as an aminated texture node.  Thanks again!!