I noticed late last week that the dotnetkicks image service is failing to respond to requests containing URLs for unkicked stories.  Not sure when this behavior started, or if it's newly defined behavior, but I've submitted issue 233 through the dotnetkicks google code bug tracking system.

If you're noticing this issue as well, please star the bug (and kick this story).

Update

thanx to gavinjoyce, this issue appears to be fixed as of 2008 Dec 08, 19:30 UTC.