The Sametime Gateway and the mystery of the red icon

I previously mentioned about the mystery of the red icon well today IBM support has come back with an explanation which is almost a bizzare as the problem itself. To recap the problem we have is after upgrading our Sametime Server to 7.5.1 AOL and Yahoo users in a Sametime buddylist were appearing with a red icon instead of the or icons. After a number of rounds of debug and other troubleshooting here is the answer we were given. When an external user is added to the buddy list, the subscribe request is sent from the client to the Sametime Server to the Sametime gateway, included in the request is a “Network of Origin request” Prior to 7.5.1 the Sametime Server did not handle “Network of Origin Requests” so the client defaulted to the locally stored icons. Sametime 7.5.1 handles the request and passes it to the gateway, which returns to the client a URL with the location of the icon for AOL or Yahoo ( this is apparently a result of a legal agreement between IBM and AOL/Yahoo where they want the icon retrieved from them real time, not using a locally stored version). The Sametime client received the URL, but does not honor the OS Proxy settings, so if the client can not access the URL it returns the red icon, which is a default in Eclipse. SPR MALN74YLF4 has been created, but is not included in Sametime 7.5.1 CF1 which is due out this month, we are hoping to obtain a hotfix from IBM, we are not sure if it will make Sametime honor the proxy, or if it will default to the icon stored locally if the one specified in the URL is not reachable. Has anyone else seen this? IBM seems confident in the answer, but I find it strange that no one else has seen or reported this issue to IBM