[pkscout]

Any idea when Last.fm shutdown the ability to request artist images? And possibly album cover images also.

Seems like the artist images was a few months ago. That was right about the time I added support for fanart.tv and theaudiodb.com.

Looking closer some artists like A-Ha for example are still showing album covers in the discography section. But other artists like Abba are not showing any.

But looking on TheAudioDB.com here for Abba and the album called "The Visitors", there is an album cover present. But when viewing the artist Abba in my XBMC there is no cover showing for this album.

I tried to reload the artist Abba but that makes no difference.

We need to do a few things here to try and figure this out:

1- confirm with the skin author that (s)he is actually using the AS data for the discography.
2- assuming the answer is yes, find an artist not showing the discography and go look in the ArtistInformation directory in userdata/addon_data/script.artistslideshow/ArtistSlideshow. Those directories are all hash names. If you download AS Helper, there is an option to generate a hash list of all the artists in your library so that you can easily find them.
3- look for a file called theaudiodbartistsalbums.nfo (or lastfmartistbio.nfo if AS couldn't find anything on theaudiodb) and open it. Somewhere in that XML will be URLs for thumbnails. In the case of theaudiodbartistsalbums.nfo you're looking for strAlbumThumb.
4- Copy the URL out of the .nfo file and paste it into your browser to make sure it's working.
5- Rinse and repeat for other artists.

If you get back valid images from your browser, then the issue is with XBMC or the skin. AS doesn't render or download the album art. It just provides the URL.