the image and its location are more interesting to me than the supposed 'exploit'.

the image is 70x70 with a horizontal and vertical resolution of 96dpi. nothing special here except for an image of one butte ugly dude.

the url actually points to footprint.net:

hm.sc.msn.com.c.footprint.net

crawling the home directory shows nothing at all in the root directory. rather suspicious.

i tried the url on linux (FF) and xp (FF & IE). nothing crashed but in windows teatimer complained of three attemps to add a reg entry for a bho (browser helper object). a full scan of the system showed nothing, but i kick myself in the ass for trying to download anything from a url i dont know and shouldn't trust...and from a link somebody posted. i should really know better.

BTW i got the img via wget and attached it here. scanned it and it showed to be clean