Got it running, disregard my post 2 up.
I also did the modification that rotates the banner. Works fine but I noticed that the browser doesn't refresh the banners very well. If you load the first time on a showthread template for instance, all the other threads you view afterwards show the same banner. Until you refresh the browser. Is this a browser caching issue or can something be done to force the page to request a new banner? Do views get counted if its cached like this?
thx