Pop-up Permission Issue Due to Proper Access Checks...?

A short description of my setup (http://byfai.com) first...

- Drupal 6, Taxonomy, Image and Image Assist...
- 4 terms/categories under the same Vocabulary for story/article/content classification
- Inline images are handled as follow: Images uploaded, filed under the same terms/categories of the main story/article, *unpublished*. Use Image Assist tags to embed the images, clicks are linked to pop-ups.
- Taxonomy term is used for navigation links (e.g. http://byfai.com/miscellaneous = http://byfai.com/taxonomy/term/12)

The pop-ups used to work but just today, I found out that they've stopped working, "Access Denied" is shown instead. I have to make the inline images "published" to get them working again. Not sure when it started but maybe it's related to http://drupal.org/node/520564?

However, I don't want to get the inline images "published" because doing that will clutter up my navigations. Any idea to solve the problem, besides creating a separated Vocabulary for inline images?

Thanks in advance.

P.S. A solution that will be compatible down the road with Drupal 7 would be great.