strange ie and firefox display problem

ok i have a page that queries google base and displays the resluts. on firefox 2.0 and ie7 images display just fine. but on firefox 1.5 and ie6 they dont display

hereis the php code that displays the image

<?php if ($imagelink !== NULL){ ?><img src="<?php echo $imagelink; ?>" alt="viewablehouse.com" />
	 <?php } ?>

Code (markup):

here is the output in view source

<td colspan="6" align="left"><img src="http://base.google.com/base_image?q=http%3A%2F%2Fimages.ncinfo.net%2Fphototmp%2Fphotos_nt%2F36901%2F539496826.jpg&dhm=2b4227b3&size=6" alt="" />
	 </td>

Code (markup):

as you can see
http://base.google.com/base_image?q...os_nt/36901/539496826.jpg&dhm=2b4227b3&size=6
this is the url outputted

if you put that into the address bar in ie6 or firefox 1.5 the image displays.

another funny thing that happened in ie 6 was that after i put the image url in the address bar and viewed the image on its own. the image displayed in ie 6 when i refreshed the page. is this a caching issue? is there some code that i can put in the top of my page to get them to display? I tried urldecode and html special chars. both didnt work.
thanks