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Get someone to look at the database queries in coldfusion. Unless you have tens of millions of flashes it should be able to handle it on even a reasonably modest server for your traffic levels.  It doesn't sound like it should be taxing. However it sounds like your problem is some badly structured queries. The good news though is that this is probably quicker and easier too fix than upgrading hosting, coding new removal behaviour or any other "work-around" What would you do to avoid Google thinking its a poorly maintained site? Sorry to sound glib, but the answer is "maintain it better".

We do also own the image generating site, so we could add it to our central Webmaster Tools account. It's used by a large number of other client sites. My usual preference is to verify by uploading a file. Do you know if we would have to reverify the imagesite for every other client site that uses it? The main issue is that we want the images to be indexed, and for the resulting traffic to be sent to the client site - not to the image site. Has anyone got experience in using image indexing this way with xml files, and proved that traffic does come through? cheers

hi Keri The problem went away after 3 days without us doing anything much. But the client was pretty antsy during those 3 days. I had posted on the Google forums, and one guy had suggested that there were problems with the dns  - the intodns.com tool highlighted some.  Possibly missing dns servers - there was unusual stuff in the intodns report. We don't manage the nameservers for the siite with the problem, so there wasn't anything we could do. The site was recrawled, possibly as a result of resubmitting the nameserver, and it was ok. thanks chris