> Ditto everything that Joshua says AND,
> don't recover into anything but an empty directory on a
> largly empty file system unless you know, and have practiced, 
> what you are doing.
> 
> I have a pretty good idea what I'm doing, and I have
> practiced this technique.  Yet I still recover to an
> empty directory.  Then transfer things if I'm happy
> with what was recovered.

This is sound advice and once I did this, all was basically well.
Another point I would mention having successfully tackled this wonderful
part of Amanda: make sure the good version of tar is first in your path
when recovering. Part of the reason I had problems is that when I went
to 'tar t' my image, it was using old, crappy tar in /usr/sbin/, not
good, healthy tar in /usr/local/bin/ this led me to believe I was doing
it wrong, when in fact I just needed to clarify my path situation.

Thanks to Jon and Joshua, who as usual, have the answer and explain it
well.