Backgrounds on elements in Outlook or RichText / Html email?

This is a really odd one.

I'm sure I've had it working before, but now I'm no so sure.

All I'm trying to do is basically add some text over the top of an image.

First I had an absolutely positioned div, with the background set, so the image would always be set to the bottom of the page, but this messed up whenever someone replied, showing up on top of whatever they replied with. The background SEEMED to work this wa, but with the overlapping issue was unusable.

So, I tried with a simple table instead, again with css providing all the size/padding/margins/background.
This looked fantastic when I was composing, and showed up just find when I view my outbox/sent items..

But, the background wouldn't show when it arrived the other end.

So, I tried simply throwing all standards out the window and specifying all the table size and background properties withing the tag using the old <td background="yum.gif"> .

Again, looked great my end, but didn't show when displayed on another machine.

What gives? Is it that :

1 : Outlook isn't embedding the image in the mail?

2 : It IS embedding the image, but it's linking to an image relatively ( IE : C:\MyFolder\MyImage.jpg ) ?

3 : Outlook etc are generally screwed and only show backgrounds on stuff when view mails you've composed yourself ???!!1

4 : I'm going mad.

5 : I'm just imagining it and no-one else has this problem.

6 : There's a simple solution, but I'm missing the obvious.

Any help, as always, GREATLY apreciate.

At my wits end.