auto-update hangs image crunching

i’m running 3 blogs.

2 of them have not been able to auto-update for some time.
we get as far as: "Downloading update from http://wordpress.org/wordpress-3.1.zip…" and nothing else

i just manual updated one blog to 3.1 using FTP.

this blog now seems to believe that it has not been updated, because it continues to inform me: "WordPress 3.1 is available! Please update now."

in addition to this, the flash-uploader hangs on “Crunching…” all the time.

since server is configured at 32MB php memory, i have tried all the methods of increasing this.
config file, no effect
.htaccess, crashes blog
asking the server admins… seems they added some php.ini files with:

upload_max_filesize = 64M
memory_limit = 64M
 post_max_size = 64M

but this has had no effect what so ever.

any ideas?