Ok I was lucky enough to find troy's solutions through a random search and it works for me. However, any idea how to keep the image proportional? it gets distorted now on an window resize.

never mind, problem solved, and my mistake.

The problem is that vertical centering can not be done in a way that works on all computers, browsers, screen resolutions, screen aspect ratios, browser configurations, and current browser window size and ratio. Anything that works uses some kind of kludge that may stop working with any software update. The introduction of the 16 x 9 screen killed off most of the methods that used to work.

The World Wide Web was never designed to allow vertical centering. Web pages are not supposed to index to the browser window, but are supposed to start at the top and grow down until the content is exhausted.

People should realize that attempts to center vertically are an abuse of the WWW and W3C intent, and should stop trying. Entirely too much time and effort has been wasted on this. A web page is a document, not a screen.