I just added the userinfo block sprite mod by spastic and it is awesome. Could you explain a bit how that could be used for most images on a sites theme. It seems to load fast and would be a bunch less calls if i could do that with the themes images. Any links, tips or tid bits would be awesome friends.

Instead of loading each image one at a time, a sprite is loaded once and css defines where a section of the sprite is displayed.

http://css-tricks.com/css-sprites/
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I think it does make sense for many of the smaller common icons that are used in many places. And, it would be even better if the CMS code be modified to use these common icons rather than every module having a potentially different look-and-feel.

Thanks for the kind words nextgen
In case you missed it on raven's site there is an alternate sprite pack available for the block http://www.ravenphpscripts.com/postt20295.html

It should give you a little background on how it is put together, as well as tips for customizing.

There are also the numbered list sprites, which are a questionable usage of sprites, and were only used to keep ie7 compatibilty. But here's some custom versions of those:
http://www.ravenphpscripts.com/postt20331.html

There are times sprites make sense, and other times they do not. For instance, I tried creating a sprite version of country flags, but the resulting background image was 60kb, plus a ton of css, which didn't make much sense to display a few flags on a given page. Although if every page of your site had 25 different flags on it, then it might start to make more sense...

Sprites are great for icons and image-mouseover effects, but not so great if the resulting sprite image and css becomes too large. Another recent approach to icons is using a custom icon font, which offers greater versatility regarding icon size, but may not be well supported on all platforms, such as mobile devices.

Guardian recently recommended html kickstart (very cool) which shows a good example of using a font for Icons/Glyphs.
http://www.99lime.com/elements/

or customize one at icomoon
http://keyamoon.com/icomoon/

and if you don't know how to use custom fonts, check out font squirrel (also very cool) which has ready to use font packs or a font face generator
http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fontface
http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fontface/generator

Just another approach that some may like