The problem is I don't need an actual link, I need a hyperlinked image which pops up a new window when clicked on. The ImageButton object does not support targeted window popups, and the hyperlink does not support images.
That leaves me with a templated field that contains an anchor wrapped around an image all standard HTML controls. The f-up comes in when the link is clicked on, it causes a full postback. Because of this, it regenerated the "hyperlink" before it actually fires off it's previous state, damn I hate gridviews. The scenario seems pretty simple to resolve, add the "EnableEventValidation" page directive and make sure that the databinding, which I failed to mention is from a ObjectDataSource object I build up dynamically during runtime, is only executed if there is no postback on the page, but this does not work for this particular problem.
What I can probably do is transform the presentation of the linkbutton to display an image instead of text using CSS which might work.
'Not everything is binary, if you look closer you might find some hexadecimal in there somewhere'