Thanks Nancy,
They may indeed work remotely but not locally because the root relative slash takes the root path of your local computer's drive which isn't the same on a real server... Modern browsers are much less forgiving of code errors.
I guess, since my old DW 4 used to always preview correctly locally in my browsers from my hard drive, the older browsers must have been more forgiving... since all of my older files, both the DW 4 and DW MX files show up correctly now within this newer installation of DW MX, it's apparent that DW thinks this code and the root relative slashes and the image location slashes are okay, but new browsers don't.
Thanks,
digi