Yes, it was much easier for this particular thing in UBB6.5 because user groups was all in a single db entry, and you just parsed out the particular group you were looking for.
I actually need it to read through all the groups a member belongs to, if possible, and not just stop at the first one, because everyone belongs to the group "users", and lots belong to "users" and "mod" or other combinations. So if they belong to a donation group ("angels" on my board) it would need to cycle thru all the group entries for that user ID and assign the grouppic info if *any* of their groups was "group 7" or whatever.
I appreciate y'all looking at what I've done so far and giving this advice! =)