Saving Textures - TGAs and DDS

I'm not hot on graphics. Indeed, I am awful. Give me text any day!

However, I need to understand something and hope you will excuse my gross ignorance and help me understand a little about the world of the texturer...

When I open up a strat-map tga and try to save it, well..it does not seem to save in the right way. It becomes a smaller file and has a different file-association icon with it etc.

I have installed the Nvidia plug-ins. The images in question have "1 layer, 1 alpha layer". I am saving them on settings "2d texture" and "DXT5 (interpolated alpha)" - which I believe are the settings for unit textures. I am selecting the "use exisiting mip maps" radio button.

They are dds files (tga final extention)

I tried ading symbols to unit cards and that failed too. Good aren't I? ;)

Please remove me from the gross ignorance.

Thx.

they are supposed to be unit_name.tga.dds

Thx.

It would have helped if I opened the MIP maps too...buildings must be slightly different to unit textures in that regard.