[kh99]

The situation is a little complicated. A user can have a "standard" avatar, a custom avatar, or no avatar. image.php only returns the custom avatar, so you really shouldn't be calling that unless you already know that the user has one (otherwise you get a broken image). Also, assuming a user does have a custom avatar, you should be putting a timestamp on the url (like image.php?userid=X&dateline=Y) otherwise a browser will cache it and maybe not see a change in a user's custom avatar for days after it happens.

So anyway, you should be checking what kind of avatar a user has and building the url accordingly, instead of always using image.php. What template is your code from?