I finally figured out why imagemagick wasn't working properly in my windows 2K development environment.
It was simple: I needed to put the path in single quotes so the backtics wouldn't be replaced by PHP at runtime.
I put the executable in c:\imagemagick, so the correct path looks like this:
$wgImageMagickConvertCommand = 'c:\imagemagick\convert.exe';
Thanks to everyone who offered their help and input on this.
Kip Rainey