By the way, I just tried the image cck patch again on node_import 5.x-1.6 and got it to work!

A few comments:
- node_import/supported/cck/content.inc is the file that needs to be patched

- you then need to edit the patched content.inc and make this change after finding line with unset($node->$dummy_name):
//unset($node->$dummy_name)

- images need to be placed in the files directory, under your drupal installation.

- in the csv file, put name of image as a separate field e.g. if image is files\image1.gif, then only put image1.gif in field

- during import, map the image field to the "Image Fid (field_image_cache)" field.

After this it worked for me...

I am using ImageField 5.x-2.0-rc8, and all the Image modules 5.x-1.8, ImageCache 5.x-2.0-rc2, cck 5.x-1.5