I find it hard to believe that your choice of browser affects the operation of
PHP.
Where is this report?
I may have been mistaken about the "report": "Windows versions of PHP prior to PHP 4.3.0 do not support accessing remote files via this function, even if allow_url_fopen is enabled." (Found at
http://us2.php.net/manual/en/function.imagecreatefromjpeg.php) The server is running Linux, so it's not Windows PHP, it's the client (IE).
I find it hard to believe, too. The error is (as I recall) "call to undefined function () in <source> at <line>" with no function name given, just the empty parentheses. It doesn't happen in Firefox, Mozilla, or Netscape.