thanks everyone for your plentyful input!
@hyperion: Clearing the cache indeed brings back View->Source ability from the top menu but not from the context menu, so I still think there is something wrong with my page / host in particular. When I choose to save the target rather than the picture, I do not get an error about downloading, but a dialog to download displayimage.htm.
@casper: Cool, I didn't know the thumbnail setting was the one in effect for the intermediate pictures, too. The funtion I would prefer is set pixels to XXX height or width whichever is greater. I think this would help with having cleaner line heights and widths for thumbnails.
@gaugau: Server compression seems to be off from what I can tell from
http://nic.funpic.de/phpinfo.php . Also when viewing the html source it looks nice and readable and not cramped together as I would think it would look if it was compressed. Or am I mixing things up here? Regarding free hosting... I just want to wait until I actually have some content before I pay for things...
Also, I can't say I am positive, but I am almost sure that this SAVE AS problem only occured after my web host has changed the way he implements the google ad bar. It went from static at the bottom to dynamic always at the screen bottom. There is a php wrapper around any code that is mine. The wrapper code even gets inserted in the *.reg file that the xp_publish page attempts to offer for download, causing it to dysfunction obviously. IE will download that file as .htm and Mozilla as .reg, but both will have the wrapper code.