I have a menu page that consists of links to other pages. The page has a background image of a globe. The globe is divided into seperate sections for each menu item. As a user hovers over each section I change the background image(The same globe with that section highlighted.)

That is what I have so far except that they have to hover over a small anchor tag that I put in not the whole section. I want to change it so that they can actually hover over all of the section they are selecting.

I found usemap online but haven't found any examples where it will actually change the background image.. only allows you to set a link for certain shapes.

Can anyone point me in the right direction?

hm well what method are you using right now to change it. can you show us your code? or link your page?

Here is one way to accomplish what you want.
The basics are to place the image on the background of the page and then when the on-hover status is determined, the image is replaced by another. This method as explained above uses new images for the on-hover replacement.
Another method described here uses a single image containing several 'pictures' and 'offsets' the image so that the "mapped" section is displayed on hover. You didn't leave us a link to look at, so we can't make a determination as to which might be best for your application. Perhaps you could leave a link for review?

Oops, sorry, upon re-reading this topic, I now realize that you have a handle on the techniques, but want to 'reshape' the hot spot for the rollover? If so, go here and check out the part about polygons. I googled on "Image mapping html shapes" to find this link. (hint)

Im not exactly sure if I understood correctly, why dont you post a link to your site which you are developping?

What generator are you using? (dreamweaver, notepad, frontpage..) If you are using dreamweaver its very easy to achieve rollovers and to draw shapes , rectangles circles and polygons...

By the way, if some one is interested, i didnt know that the 'map' tag was xhtml strict supported, but made a quick test and it is!

I was successful in finding an Image Mapping Software which is really good. Better than anything else I have found. I did this: http://www.jlhaslip.trap17.com/mlafever/consulting.html using two "layers", the entire image and then there are about 16 other hotspots which sit on top of it. I'll add better definitions for it next. Fill in both alt and title, because ff and Opera use title= and IE uses alt=. Javascript functions are also available by defining them. Check out their sample.

The package is called geohtml, the source is: http://www.fegi.ru/geohtml/