What factors affect the placement of inline images?

[Lloyd Zusman <ljz@asfast.com>]

Is anyone willing to explain all the factors that could affect the
placement of inline images in messages displayed in Gnus?

What I'm looking for is a list of the variables that determine image
placement, as well as the standard Gnus behavior w/r/t mime types and
message parts that have an effect on the placement of inline images.
I'm talking about images that are small enough to be displayed within
the message window.

As you know, I recently posted a query about a problem I started
noticing in Gnus after I upgraded from XEmacs 21.2.44 to XEmacs
21.4.3.  In the earlier version of XEmacs, multipart messages whose
topmost part contained the encoding of an image would cause the image
displayed to be displayed at the top of the message buffer, with text
(or whatever) in subsequent message parts being shown below the inline
image.

However, after the XEmacs 21.4.3 upgrade (and with the same version of
Gnus), these same multipart messages show the inline image from the
topmost message part at the bottom of the message buffer, irrspective
of the disposition ("attachment", "inline", or no disposition).

Clearly, this change in image positioning has to do with my use of the
newer version of XEmacs, but I suspect that the problem is occurring
because of Gnus' use of one or more xemacs functions whose behavior
might have changed in very recent versions of XEmacs.

This is the reason for my query.  If someone could explain the factors
which could affect Gnus' decision as to where to place inline images,
I will then dig through the elisp in my Gnus and XEmacs installation
to try to figure out why this is happening ... and then, to make my
findings known to this group.

By the way, I'm now using the early-morning-of-May-24 CVS version of
Gnus.

Thanks in advance.

-- 
 Lloyd Zusman
 ljz@asfast.com