Yes I am running as root. If I try as a user I get the same behavior.
Two things here. If on my desktop in a gnome window I run "import -silent -window root screen.png" I get a file.
However if I run the command using a shell script on a machine its not working. So in my script I have: export DISPLAY=:0.0 /usr/bin/import -silent -window root screen.png
Thanks,
Jerry