Since everybody's so frustrated about this, I'm going to go ahead and force the issue with the upload server. I'll be disabling uploads and turning off the upload.wikimedia.org web server for a few hours so we can get everything moved over and totally copied once and for all.
Alas this'll mean not seeing images for a few hours, but it should finally be nicer after this. :D
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/November_2005_image_server
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)