These seem to be the important parts: I see ads for rowing machines and diet systems with images of steppers, treadmills, etc. I'd say you'd be better off with people exercising without machines. As for the second, change the background of the ads to a light gray or the light blue you use elsewhere. Centering up the whole container for the images and the ads will balance things out.
Not a problem at all man, I highly recomend you set that up if it is easy to do with your current website configuration. If you can set it up easy on your current website, it will really help to monitor your campaign.
Ya possibly although in my exp from doing this on a few of my sites this just catches the readers eye more, the clicks are still converting well.
this seems quite hypocritical on google's part since they brought out horizintal ad links that are clearly designed to mimick navigation menus... (and hence trick people to click on them)....so how can a few little images be any more inappropriate? my view is that if ad links are ok then images near ads must be OK too. my 2cents
i too use images next to ads on my blog http://labnol.blogspot.com and notice a better CTR since I started putting images next to my 234x60 block.