Images don't display when the file system is in Private mode.

I'm pretty sure this was working fine until I upgraded to Drupal 5.2. My files directory is a sub of my www root. (pub/www.mysite.com/files) Private mode is turned on for the file system. I read somewhere while trying to troubleshoot this problem that your files directory should be outside of the www root for it to work correctly. (pub/files & pub/www.mysite.com) I don't remember seeing that before, but I have audio files, as well as Avatar Gallery image files which have played or display with no problem even though they are in the files directory sub of www root. The audio still plays fine, avatar gallery is no problem. I normally don't mess with drupal's image module, as I've been using Menalto's Gallery2 as my photo gallery. Lately I've become more comfortable with Drupal and would prefer to have all of my content tied directly through Drupal and not through third party apps.

I've attached a screenshot of what is happening. It's pretty straightforward. When you load an image node, it starts to display the image (it shows the box with a red X) and then resolves to the test title of the image file instead. The permissions are correct the directories (755). I tried 777 anyways. It's not a browser issue since Gallery2 displays fine. I tried IE instead of Firefox anyways. I thought it might be an image import problem, so I created and image node instead of doing an image import, but no luck. Oh, and I changed the file system to public and it works, so that kind of spells it out don't it? Of course public would not be acceptable as I don't want the whole world accessing my photos. I hope you understand that I can't possibly move the files folder at this point as well. I have almost a hundred music files of my own composition uploaded, which break as soon as I try changing the folder in the file system settings page (this is after I copied the directory just to be clear).

This has to be a Drupal 5.2 issue. I just checked one of my other sites http://www.kfol.org/ and the images are doing the same thing. Nothing has changed on this site except for the Drupal version. Oh and the image module version itself. Son of a... Well I don't know which one it is, but I guess I'll post here first, and you can switch it over to image-5.x-1.5 if you don't think it's a core problem. Thanks for taking a look at this.