Access denied fetching files on live setup

Everything works fine on my localhost.

But on a live server, I don't get the imagefield files when I run a content retrieval.

It's definitely not a permissions thing, because I can do this in the Exec PHP block and it works perfectly:

  $file = content_retriever_xmlrpc('file.get', 110); // whichever fid is on the remote node
  dsm($file); // WORKS!

So the question is -- how can the exact same line of code work when given in the PHP block, but not as part of an update?

Remembering the blog post about the clock (http://www.drupaler.co.uk/blog/drupal-services-and-dreaded-clock/466) I tried increasing the Token expiry time. You'd think 30000 would be okay no? Nope.

I tried the debug patch to the Key auth module () and my Drupal log I got an 'Access denied'. The only place in the code that an 'Access denied' message is given is this:

     if (!db_result(db_query("SELECT COUNT(*) FROM {services_key_permissions}         WHERE kid = '%s' AND method = '%s'", $api_key, $method_name))) {       return services_error(t('Access denied.'), 401);     }

Surely if that fails as part of an update, it should ALWAYS fail, even when done manually. It's the same user account, the same API key, etc.

What DOES solve the problem is commenting out the part in content_retriever_xmlrpc() that checks $login_session_id -- in other words, if we make content_retriever_xmlrpc() do system.connect and user.login before EVERY method call, it works. But I still don't see how that can be giving a services_key_permissions error!

Does anyone have any ideas?