sam_a

I list ten other articles at the end of a post, where I would like to show an icon image next to the title

Try something like this (there are a lot of “post image” functions):

<?php the_post_image(); ?>

function the_post_image($size = 'thumbnail') {
	$id = get_the_ID();
	if ( empty($id) ) {
		trigger_error( __FUNCTION__ . "(): Couldn't get current post ID", E_USER_WARNING);
		return false;
	}
	$images = get_children(array(
		'numberposts' => 1,
		'post_parent' => $id,
		'post_type' => 'attachment',
		'post_mime_type' => 'image',
	));
	if ( empty($images) ) {
		// Post has no attached images
		return false;
	}
	$image = array_pop($images);
	$output = wp_get_attachment_image($image->ID, $size);
	if ( empty($output) ) {
		trigger_error( __FUNCTION__ . "(): Couldn't print image for attachment #{$image->ID}", E_USER_WARNING);
		return false;
	}
	echo $output;
}

The question I have is how can I get it to pull random thumbnails from any post?

Something like

$images = get_children('post_type=attachment&post_mime_type=image&post_parent=0');

$image = $images[array_rand($images)];

$parent =& get_post($image->post_parent);

echo '<a href="'
	. get_permalink($image->post_parent)
	. '">'
	. wp_get_attachment_image( $image->ID, 'thumbnail' )
	. apply_filters( 'the_title', $parent->post_title )
	. '</a>';

<?php if ( $images = get_children(array(
		'post_parent' => get_the_ID(),
		'post_type' => 'attachment',
		'post_mime_type' => 'image',
	))) : ?>
	<ul>
		<?php foreach( $images as $image ) :  ?>
			<li><?php echo wp_get_attachment_link($image->ID, 'medium'); ?></li>
		<?php endforeach; ?>
	</ul>
<?php else: // No images ?>
	<!-- This post has no attached images -->
<?php endif; ?>

You can try this to disable autosave (though I don’t know if that will fix this problem):

http://samm.dreamhosters.com/wordpress/plugins/disable-autosave.php

If you have a copy of your WordPress directory on your computer, and you have a text editor that can search multiple files, you could search them all at once for SELECT cat_id, cat_name and so find which file is making the bad query.

You can (temporarily) add define('WP_DEBUG', true) to your wp-config file — that will print the database warning on the page, hopefully near the source of the problem. See http://codex.wordpress.org/Editing_wp-config.php#Debug

Try switching to the default theme, too.

Clear the cache, delete cookies, quit, relaunch?

I had this problem in both Camino & Safari — Camino worked after clearing the cache but Safari worked only after I cleared the cookies too.

The error message looks odd, is that the whole thing? It’s supposed to tell you the file and line number with the bad query.

Probably it’s an old plugin — the cat_id, cat_name, etc. fields were removed in WP 2.3.