To covert a grass bank to other ground cover plant I have heard that
you can mow the lawn short, lay newspaper over the area and mulch it.
This is opposed to using something like Round Up to kill the grass. IS
this an accepted method and if so how long before you can plant the
zone?

Yup -- I just did this with a 30'x10' section of my front yard a week or two
ago. Worked like a charm. For the main part, I put down about one full
section of newspaper (6-8 individual pages) then covered that with around 4
inches of mulch (ended up being one bag of mulch for about every 8 square
feet). Let it sit for approximately a month to really give it time to die,
carefully turn the mulch every week or so, and you should be good to go.

As someone else mentioned, you'll want to do this in sections and preferably
on a day when there is not much wind. I had newspaper flying everywhere
on me -- halfway into the project, a summer rainstorm hit us outta nowhere
and THAT was fun.

James