I have been removing my image handling tools and replacing them with resorcelocater thingies. A truly strange error is occurring, typically with GIF files. If I reference an image out of my own image locations it appears in the scene as a grey shaded image, if I place the image under a copy of demo/HUD and reference it there, I get a full color image...any ideas?? In both cases an image is found using the same sequence of calls. The only difference seems to be the directory it is found in. Does this make any kinda of sense at all??

Any getTexture() method of the TextureLoader will always return a valid Texture reference. If the desired Texture could not be found, then a fallback Texture is returned. You can test that, if you call
Texture tex = TextureLoader.getInstance().getTexture( ... );
System.out.println( "is fallback tex: " + ( tex == TextureLoader.getFallbackTexture() ) );
I've just added a convenience method for this, which you can use, after you changed out:
System.out.println( "is fallback tex: " + TextureLoader.isFallbackTexture( tex ) );
But now for the solution for yuor problem:
The desired Texture was not found, because you forgot to add an appropriate TextureStreamLocator. The TextureLoader needs to know, where to load Textures from. So you have to add instances of TextureStreamLocator for any location, where to load textures from. The ResourceLocator provides an easy way to do that. Just call
ResourceLocator resLoc = ResourceLocator.create( "myresfolder" );
resLoc.cerateAndAddTSL( "tex2" ); // where tex2 is a subfolder (or subresource) of "myresfolder"
If you reference your resources by a relative name to the ResuorceLocator's baseURL, then you can simply say
ResourceLocator resLoc = ResourceLocator.create( "myresfolder" );
resLoc.cerateAndAddTSL(); // The TSL is created for the baseURL
I think, I should add methods to the TextureLoader, that take an URL. Then you could use the TextureLoader without TextureStreamLocators and you could use it similar to the model or shader loaders. I think, this makes sense.
Marvin