My guess is that the server on SportingNews.com is sometimes responding with something that isn't really a GIF, which causes the various image-processing tools to abend. It probably varies from IP-addr to IP-addr as to how often you get the bad data. I just ran it thrice with Python 2.2 here, and it worked the first time, failed the second time, and worked the third time.
I suppose I could add a debugging option which would dump the bits from failed parses into a file somewhere... Bill
