I am new to the forum and spent most of yesterday cracking the code on this so I thought I would organize my steps and post what I found as a means of thanking the board and Nightowl without whom I could not have gotten as far as I did.

First of all, my version of Ghost 2003 was .775 so I had to upgrade to .793 as I have SATA hard disk drives (although I remain confused as to whether the fact that I was originally able to create images from SATA partitions relates to my motherboard, etc.).  In any case, I installed Ghost under Windows XP and followed the steps here:

http://service1.symantec.com/Support/sharedtech.nsf/docid/2007010219171513

to get my version from .775 to .793.

Next, I followed Nightowl's instructions for building a Standard Ghost Boot CD/DVD -- on Steroids found here:

http://nightowl.radified.com/bootcd/bootcdintro.html

with the following exception for Nero Express (I have no access to any of the Roxio Creator versions he covers).  The directions are over three years old and I was unable to burn the resulting image in the last step (an .IMA image) using Nero Express 6 as it seems to now be aware of Nightowl's trick for fooling it into using the target .IMA file instead of the default boot image provided by Nero Express when creating a bootable floppy disk image.  Unfortunately most of the freeware/shareware programs that I was able to find cannot recognize a .IMA image in creating a boot CD.  Thus I downloaded the trial version of Nero 9

http://www.nero.com/enu/downloads-nero9-trial.php

although in retrospect I could have probably got by much more quickly with just the burning Rom shareware:

http://www.soft32.com/Download/free-trial/Nero_Burning_ROM/4-263-1.html

and used the following steps with contradictions to Nightowl's general instructions noted:

Select Nero Buring ROM from start menu under Nero 9 folder in the Windows XP Start Menu.  Under new compilation select icon for CD-ROM (boot) and under boot tag browse to target image (bootcdp1.IMA) under the Source of boot image data section.  One can enable expert settings under the Advanced section but the defaults seemed to work fine Floppy Emulation 1.44MB, Nero Boot-Loader V6.0, Load Segment 07C0 (not the 0X7C0 from Nightowl's notes) and 1 loaded sector.  The ISO tab defaults all worked fine: Data Mode 1, ISO 9660 + Joliet File System, Max. of 11 characters for File Name Length (ISO) and ISO 9660 Character set, Relaxed all restrictions.  I used automatic for Label tab and created Ghost Boot CD.  On the Dates tab I used default (use date and time from the original file for File dates while Volume Dates were not selected).  Under Misc tab I used the default cache files from disk and network under caching while the cache files smaller than was not selected.  I unmarked the print label box under Lightscribe.  Finally on the Burn tab, under Action select Write and Finalize disc.  The writing defaults I did not change write speed 40x, method Track-at-once and 1 copy selecting only buffer underrun protection.  At this point one clicks on the New button at the bottom which brings up a new screen with Ghost Boot CD displayed at far left.  Now click on Burn in the top middle and one is returned to the same earlier screen with tabs but where the New button was displayed on the bottom that button now says Burn which will burn the disk.

Thus, one then has a Ghost 2003 boot CD/DVD with the latest build and both mouse and USB support.  Hope this is of help to someone.  Thanks to everyone who posts here.

Tom