Thanks Dan; Once again, you have come through. Some good lessons here and including some of the other input. The first is a reaffirmation of an old and time tested maxim. When you are getting frustrated and nothing seems to work right, take a break, go for a walk, get a night's rest and come back refreshed. Often, often, it turns out to be a simple thing, as in this case. Last night, getting frustrated and under deadline pressure, starting to just try this and then that begins to have diminishing returns. The name of the output clip and its long file path was disappearing out of sight of the small box available in the raster clip menu pane. Geez.
Second, the presence of the online community is a great resource. The little message window that just faded away said to try and contact technical support or a support community. Nine times out of ten I have great results from the support community, as in this case. Much faster, and with more success than actual technical support. I am glad it is there, as I am a user out in the wilderness hinterlands with nobody else around to ask. The fading message is a bit of a cop-out but reiterates an essential resource.
There seems to be some differences in approach in whether to specify the input raster from the immediate pull-down - thereby accessing what is in this gdb and following the folder search approach and finding and specifying the gdb, either the current one being worked upon or another one and accessing what is in that one. What I have found with the former approach is that the raster file has to be a tiled file with the extension .tpkx, otherwise it can't be found and picked. Another oddity I have found is when doing an online download and specifying all tiled downloads, sometime you get a topographic (i.e. cultural features) tiled file as well as the world hillshade topography imagery - and sometimes you don't. Don't know what controls that!
Thanks again; Dave
