Finally found a good slideshow that has cross fade effects with scriptaculous.
It's Here and is easy to wire up. Only snag I hit was if there is any whitespace in the <div> it is attaching your slides to, it will bomb. Be sure to keep whitespace OUT and it works a champ.
Also, the .slide-show class should be using position:absolute for crossfade to work. It 'snaps' into view otherwise. I just put a wrapper on the div it is talking to so that I could position it where I want by making it 'position:relative'.