MEL Woes On A Mac

So in the latest 3DBuzz project, When Mechs Attack, we're building a custom UI to facilitate the ease of selecting controls and animation attributes on our Mech, but I've hit a snag because I'm running Maya on a Mac. For some reason, Maya can't find the image files I need to place on the UI buttons [worse comes to worse I just won't have the fancy looking UI and will be reduced to using a boring button version- what fun is that?!

I've posted the query to a few message boards to see if anyone has a solution. The part of the code I'm referring to is where we house the images inside of "variables" to access them later for the buttons. I've triple-triple checked the file location paths to no avail:

string $MechRootFile ="/Users/adam_kaszycki/Documents/maya/projects/When Mechs Attack/sourceimages/Mech_Root.bmp";

string $RightFootFile ="/Users/adam_kaszycki/Documents/maya/projects/When Mechs Attack/sourceimages/melUI/Right_Foot.bmp";

string $LeftFootFile ="/Users/adam_kaszycki/Documents/maya/projects/When Mechs Attack/sourceimages/melUI/Left_Foot.bmp";

I've also tried creating a file node in the Hypergraph, mapping the file and copying the location Maya uses to access the file, sourceimages/melUI/Mech_Root.bmp, but that doesn't work either. It's gotta be a Mac bug and I'm trying to get to the bottom of it.

Anyway, just wanted to detail my frustration here as I move along.