Cool, now it seems to work perfectly. My next question is as far as optimization, is it more efficient to point to a dynamic php image file or would it be better to have a plugin with a query to retrieve the image url instead ... thanks for all of the quick responses!

This may not be what your looking for but i am an admin on oxy-moron.net. And what we did for ranks was we used the user ranks option in the Admin CP, along with the Promotions option to facilitate that.

Basically you have a usergroup for each rank you want, the images are stored on the server. Then you go to the User Ranks Menu on the left hand side. Choose Add new rank, Choose the usergroup your applying it to, If your having multiple different ranks on one user choose Yes for Stack Rank, if that is their only rank choose No. Put in the path to the image and click submit.

Then to assign someone a new rank you can just go into their ser account and change their usergroup, their image will automatically change no coding needed.

I also came up with a way of using the Promotions option to automatically advance someone from a registered user to whatever the lowest rank is. Our system originally was using a Army Rank structure, and all new registered people were Recruits. So the User Promotions option allowed us to automatically advance someone to recruit without having to change the usergroup on every new member