I had a similar issue but the image would never show in IE8, regardless of how many times I refreshed the page. It worked fine in Chrome and FF (latest versions as of the time of this post).
The image file was created in Adobe Illustrator (CS3) and saved as a JPG. It turned out to be file corruption of the JPG that I resolved by opening the file in Paint.NET, saving as a GIF, opening the GIF and re-saving as a JPG. The issue does have to do with IE8 but Paint.NET had problems with the file as well. I could not save the original JPG as a JPG; I had to switch to another format and then back.
I hope this helps those with the issue I ran in to.