user_image_default is nowhere to be found

The problem was that I am using a redirect when the user is viewing his/her page, I wanted to able to layout it. When using the default layout the picture is shown as it should. Now, after doing some research I found that what I wanted the module to do was to replace the default picture in the $user object which it doesn't unless you do a hook load or something haven't checked the code that thoroughly(I might be way of on this).

I also did some research on the $user object and basically every time I would want to access the picture I would have to call the user_load which then invokes the hook_user which then fires a query for that user. If I would want to show the picture on every page I would add a lot of queries to the database which isn't that funny. So it doesn't seem that there's a good way to add data to a $user object that doesn't have to include user_load which kind of sucks(I might be way of on this too...).

So what I did was to set up a node profile, add a user image field, add presets to it and then have a custom module set a session variable on login using hook_user to the value of the image field and then destroy the session variable on logout.