Just for kicks I imported my previous test site file into SSP B5 and published. The tiled background gif that showed in FF prior, now does not show. It shows in FF preview however. IE no problems. Any ideas?
Larryd reported a bug in SSP beta5 where backgrounds images are published using backslashes instead of forward slashes. That is probably what you are seeing.
A temporary workaround would be to make the 'images' sub folder blank. That would put all your images into the root though.