Question about envmap and particles/halo

I’m just wondering if anyone else has experienced this? I figured this would be a good place to ask.

Background:
Using cube envmap to create skyboxes -mostly outer space looking stuff. I read a tutorial about doing nebula & star-clusters from here http://www.cogfilms.com/tutorials.html and created some decent looking nebulae as a result.

Problem:
When I use the envmap from the cube as a skybox with the aforementioned nebulae at least one side of the cube never lines up correctly.

My observation:
If I do a render without the particles /nebulae everything lines up fine. I’ve successfully created cool looking skyboxes using only blender’s built in stars, and also created some by placing the cube inside a shadeless textured sphere (similar to this http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro/Build_a_skybox)

Wrote a python script to do what I needed instead of relying on envmap cubes. Happy new year.