premium with teaser image assist

Hi. I'm hoping you have a quick insight on this. I can see all images with image_assist that are not protected by the premium module. Both teasers and full nodes. But, if premium is turned on and there is an image at the top of the node then the image_assist stuff gets messed up. I think the

return $node->teaser

line in the theme function is not processing the teaser via image assist. All you get is this code in place of the image ...

[img_assist|nid=423|title=Foo Title|desc=|link=none|align=right|width=150|height=196]

Do you have any insight on this one? This only happens on nodes with premium turned on. Maybe a way to return a teaser with the image? I guess I could change the code to not return $node->teaser but a trimmed body? Thanks.