Solved:
Ok, Just so it's down somewhere for others that find themselves with this problem
Heres, what I ended up doing to solve the problem.
Problem, Jpg not supported by default install of imagemagick via gentoos' portage system.
Tryed, unmerging imagemagick and manually installing, with mixed results, see above.
Solution.
/etc/make.conf add jpeg to the use flags
emerge imagemagick with the new added use flag of jpeg and the default installation works like a champ.
Its' always something simple that eludes us.
Gentoo linux uses what they call a portage tree, like rpm's and such. Pretty clean system, emerge package and it installs the program with little fuss. adds whatever it needs to make things work the way they should. Well For the most part anyway
In this case I added jpeg to the global USE flag list so that jpeg support would get compiled in with the program when I emerged it into the system.
Problem solved.
Thanks for the help guys....
Just as an aside, whatever happened to the UNIX, MYSQL and PHP forums we used to have on the old w3t board? they really helped people like me that can get in and work on things, but just don't have the 20+ years working with unix like we do with dos and windows.
