Still More Outlook 2007 Stupidity

I receive a lot of newsletters as HTML email messages. For obvious reasons, I want to view the images in those messages, so I tell Outlook 2007 it’s okay to download the images from site somesite.com. The problem is that Outlook will download some images from a site, but not others. For example, http://www.somesite.com/image1.gif might download, but http://www.somesite.com/image2.gif will not, and will instead display as a blank space (no red X or anything) of a random size (not the size of the image in question or the size specified in the source code). Can anybody help me resolve this?

EDIT: I now know the problem’s source. Apparently, this is yet another result of Microsoft’s absurd decision to render HTML in Outlook using Word’s HTML renderer, rather than Internet Explorer’s. The Scoop on Outlook 2007. Seriously, what were they thinking??? Anyway, original post follows.

Facts:

• The images are all really out there on the web, all on the same domain.
• The images are referenced in HTML, not attached to the message. EDIT: On further examination, it looks like affected images are all referenced in the background attribute of a table HTML element…
• This only happens with specific images from specific senders. For example, the header logo from one site never downloads, but all other images in that site’s weekly newsletter display properly.
• Telling Outlook never to block downloads of images and restarting doesn’t resolve the problem.
• The images in question are all GIF files which display perfectly in MSIE and Firefox.
• My only theories so far are that Outlook sends headers the remote server doesn’t like for a particular image (weird) or that Outlook is just not even trying to download the images in question.

So, loyal reader: any ideas? Thanks!