I just downloaded the image, executed the command and got a prompt.

There is definitely something wrong with your qemu.
Where did you get it? Did you compile it yourself? What version of it are you running?

Well I got one off of SlackBuilds V 2.20.

I downloaded the current V 2.20 from the QEMU site and tried that one.

There has to be something that is causing this to fail.

I have a 64bit Slackware 14.1 system with multilibs installed. There must be something, but I can't seem to find it I have all the prerequisites and have kvm modules loaded. Hardware support for Virtualization is turned on in the BIOS. Could it be multilibs ?

It starts up and on rare occasions actually starts to load the image I am trying to boot.

I have tried several of the test images form the site and get the same results. Needless to say this is puzzling me greatly.

I also have plenty of experience with Virtualization and have used them in a production environment, so I am not totally in the dark here. I have never used QEMU before so there's that. I have been using Slackware since it was only on floppy disks so I have some experience with Slackware. I have used Unix and AIX in a production environment so I have some understanding of UNIX's in general.

VirtualBox works so there's also that.

The hardware I am using is

AMD FX6300 CPU not overclocked
ASUS M5A 78L-M LX series MB
Kingston HyperX 8GB DDR3 memory
EVGA GeForce GTX 750TI video card

all new for this build

and

SoundBlaster Live 5.1 (which could well be the culprit as it is as old as dirt)

Not even sure why I stuck that antique in there.

Well It turns out the QEMU is working only there is no output to the display. If I start one up go to the View select tabs then go to compat_monitor 0 and type system_reset and wait a while I can go to the VGA tab and the system is booted but I can not interact with it in any way. I am stumped on how to fix this.

Well it's not the hardware. I installed Debian on another partition and it works on Debian. So it's either SlackWare or one of the packages I have installed that is causing the problem. I know that other people have it working on SlackWare so I am still puzzled here about what is causing the lack of output to the video window.

Found the problem it was the version of cairo shipped with SlackWare 14.1.

I had read a thread on the Slackware specific forum about someone with a similar problem but being in stupid mode did not think it applied.

That hopefully will teach me to always confirm things.