Rick,
IBL (ADAPTIVE SKY MAPS) can work really well, and there are a few things to be aware of. The first is that color balance is strongly effected by the image you use. So you may have to de-saturate the image to get colors you expect. The second is that IBL works a bit differently than normal sky maps in that the rays are calculated more densely for bright spots on the image. This means you can get noise coming from the dim areas depending on howe the image is oriented.
I posted a pretty useful image for IBL with this tutorial.
http://www.eitechnologygroup.com/forums/viewthread/486/
If you photoshop away the sun, and use a standard light with GI set to normal and GI RI set to 1, you can get good results with out having to align the IBL. Also using a standard light with IBL or any GI sky lights seems to reduce the noise.
Good luck,
Yon





