Hey Joe!

Great explanation! I couldn't have said any better myself!!!

Some additional things to remind people include:
1) That when a server - such as the ones at AOL (since they are the ones I've also had the most problems with) gets too may requests, (such as the denyal of services attacks that were going on a few weeks ago), there is a time-out in the browser that expires and thus image doesn't load.
Note: that since ebay doesn't host the actual image - and does host the html for that particular page being viewed - the rest of the page can be displayed properly whereas the image doesn't.

2) Changes in proxy servers or Firewalls may not longer let any traffic (or transactions) go to a particular server or IP address.

Just to name a couple...

Dick