[radigast]

Thanks for reading through my post wall and responding.

Preloading the cache with the extrathumbs/extrafanart artwork avoids the whole caching-as-you-browse process but won't allow such artwork to be displayed while the source is offline because the skin has no way of determining that this extra artwork actually exists unless it can access the source.

I was thinking the same as you. However, here's the weird thing: If I take the hard drive offline again after the malformed urls have been created, the extrathumbs remain cached and are displayed. It's almost like the skin doesn't like how texturecache.py cached the extrathumbs, so it had to redo the caching...or something. Extrafanart does not show up at all when the hard drive is offline no matter what.

Out of interest, which skin is this?

Aeon NOX Gotham