I no longer have my problem and I have a strong suspicion to why I had it.

First of all to solve the problem I bought a new larger internal IDE drive yesterday and cloned my suspect older drive to it.  I've never did a clone before using Ghost 2003 and way quite impressed of the nice display that allows you to resize your partitions.  An hour later the clone was done and I swapped by old drive with my new one and instantly booted into Win XP only with a few annoyances.  XP scrambled all my drive letters for my partitions on the new drive albeit I didn't create or delete any partitions along the way when I cloned.  10 minutes and 5 reboots later I was up and running with nice big partitions on my new drive with my corrected drive letters.

So much for my new drive.  After carefully examing my image copies of my (D) partition I discovered an interesting pattern.  There are two number shown concerning a image copy.  The size of the partition and the size of the backed up data.  In the case of those images that gave me a problem these two numbers were closer together and in the case of those images that didn't give me a problem these two number were further apart, not much, but still further apart.  After taking a closer look at the numbers for my (F) partition which was the only one that was getting highlighted when it shouldn't have been is that it was the only partition on that hard drive that was physically larger than my (D) partition.  As a result Ghost is telling me that this is the only partition this particular hard drive large enough to receive the backup image.

Not knowing all the particulars, it is apparent that Ghost is doing a check to prevent the user from laying down an image to a hard drive in an area not large enough to accept it.  You see Ghost can only make an estimated guess if your images are compressed and it errors on the side of caution.  The greying out is a safeguard.  The lesson learned is to leave a higher percentage of free space in your partitions to allow backups and restores room to breathe.

Well, I have a new hard drive and my old one that was not on the blink after all.  I've attached my old drive to my SATA connection using a SATA/PATA adaptor and it works on my MOBO.  After a few days using my new drive and assuring everthing is working I'll reformat the old drive on the SATA connection and have more disk space for my daughter's music and photos.   

Thanks for enduring my ramblings the last couple of days.