oh yeah, i forgot to mention that i tried that too the other day. permissions went from 664 to 775 to 777. nada. flushing the presets and deleting & re-creating them gave me varied results. sometimes it would make an imagecache folder sometimes it wont. this is really weird.

could it be a webserver problem? i've been using lighttpd and it didn't give me any problems before. i'll try hitting my PC and restarting it. that might work.