Well I am 3+ days into this setup and I wanted to share my experiences so that others may be able to benefit. Sorry if it is a bit long winded.
I started with XBMP 4.15.2003 and RelaX.75.
Imediately noticed problems trying to run RelaX as a service on XP MCE box. The service would never start. I removed this version and installed ver. 71 (download available at the XBMP web site.) This works fine.
Next could not get video, and photos to work after viewing 3 seperate FAQ's and 2 posts on this forum. Turns out the most valuable resource was the bug list at the XBMP forums.
There needed to be some detailed explanations for this to work properly.
My service was running from a PC that is primarily used for recording video, DVD, and games. My media is on a file server in a seperate location. My thoughts were that I could run the service on my media PC and share my network drive connections of my file server. This worked but only for music.
I had to reinstall the service on my file server. Originally I had shares created with folders to specific progs and media related files, assuming that becuase they were created and accessed at the share level this would work. I had to recreate shares for individual folders containing the music, video, and photos. But it still would not work.
Back to the bug list where I found that $ROOT$ will not work for my specific version. So changing the paths in config.xml finally got me access.
Important stuff: Intial setup of your shares is extremely important. A share c:\share with folder movies inside did not work, but a share c:\share\movies did. Sharing network drives did not work except for music.
There are still bugs, but minor. For example: the first photo in all my albums is black.
The moral of the story is that the current FAQ's are not for everyone. When there are problems sometimes there are more circumstances, bug related issues, and more explanation on setting up your computer shares for this specific application is helpful. Check the bug list. Ask lots of quesitons.

Thanks for steering me in the right direction.