Hey kh99,
Thanks for the very quick response, much appreciated.
The second one ( $avauri['hascustom'] = ''; ) worked perfectly; the 1 prior to image.php is now gone, and the avatars are now fetched from the filesystem, and thus, update whenever I - or someone else - update the avatar.
The only issue that remains would be the width="" messed up, and extra given parameters as pasted in the code above. Do you recommend I simply get rid of that with a str_replace(), or would there be a more clever and efficient way to that?
Once more, thanks a fortune.