Warning: [function.getimagesize]:

I recently upgraded to WP 3.2.1 and PHP5. When I started the upgrade process, it said I should backup the WP database; to do that I had to change the database password (this is a client’s site I am editing/updating). Then the whole site was down, I corrected that by speaking to support at the hosting company, they told me to put the new db password in the wp-config.php file. The site came back, yet on a few pages there are lots of warnings like this:

Warning: getimagesize() [function.getimagesize]: Filename cannot be empty in /nfs/c06/h02/mnt/88665/domains/mataline.com/html/wp-content/themes/mataline/page.php on line 53

the other variation is the same but with ‘single.php on line 39’.
I looked up this error and found several approaches, here is what I have done so far:
changed permissions on .htaccess file to 744
created a php.ini file and added ‘allow_url_fopen = 1;’
many of the images on the site are hosted externally, so I tried to copy an image to the server and I got this error:

“bandaline1.jpg” has failed to upload due to an error
Unable to create directory /nfs/c02/h07/mnt/39655/domains/mataline.com/html/wp-content/uploads/2011/08. Is its parent directory writable by the server?

I created the /uploads/2011/08 directory, and changed permissions for the whole /uploads tree to 777, yet still the same result.

Any ideas on how to solve this would be greatly appreciated.

This is the content of line 53 of page.php, and line 39 of single.php:
$arrImageSize = getimagesize(get_post_meta($post->ID, ‘post_image’, true));