Background goes black w/ Desktop effects enabled.

This thread is closed but seems to be about the same issue. It didn't have a solution though.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1302069

If I have the effects set to none, my chosen background image comes back but with it on either of the other settings the background image goes black. I can still see a piece of it through the panel at the bottom because it is set to transparent. It's still kind of there but not showing up.

I have a Sony Vaio with a Radeon 9200 GPU. Desktop effects and Compiz worked fine in 9.04 and 8.10 but I just did a clean install of 9.10 and the problem was there from the first time it booted before I changed anything.

OK, it's got something to do with resolution or display settings. I have a 22" wide screen and when I switched my resolution to 4:3 to a lower resolution it worked and the background showed up again. Then I switched back to the 16:10 default for my monitor and it went blank again. Is there a better display/resolution manager that I could install?

is there a way to add more options to the drop down menu in the display settings where you select the resolution.