Due to the intricate nature of that painting, you're going to have to live with
a higher file size (I got it down to 75k by turning off sharpen color edges and
turning down the compression to 80). Cutting it up into 20 or more chunks like
that just adds a bunch of markup. Hell, how many dial-up users buy art anyway?

As to why it doesn't add the HREFs: I'll be the first to admit I'm not 100%
sure, mostly due to the fact I use Fireworks to make graphics exclusively.
Though I have heard of other people having issues with Fireworks stripping URLS
from exported slices.

Jim & Linda can feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the
assumption that the HTML/CSS output in Fireworks was for prototyping web
mockups, not for creating production HTML.

If I was trying to make that splash page of yours work I would just take that
solid image, all 80-100K of it, export it out as a single JPEG, insert it into
the page in Dreamweaver, and set a simple HREF to the page I wanted to link to.
I'm not sure why you're using hotspots at all? If you want to have only the
name/logo at the top link, just draw the hotspot on via Dreamweaver.

The concept of intro pages is widely considered outdated, and unfriendly to
the user these days anyway. The best solution would be to take the user right
to the content they're looking for anyway ;-)