Rails 3.2 Asset Pipeline - Not Working for Images but is for Compass

Question

I went through the compass 3.2 pain and I thought i had it working beautifully a month or so back

However oddly my images seem flaky. They will work for a day straight, I will crank some code the next day i wake up and fire up webrick and the images dont appear.

My Compass/Sass all works beautifully partials/plugins and all that goodness. But I notice almost daily that when I start work. My images wont show up on my "development" webrick environment

My log says

Started GET "/assets/home/sms.png" for 127.0.0.1 at 2012-02-23 07:22:55 -0500 Served asset /home/sms.png - 200 OK (8ms)

or occasionally...

Started GET "/assets/home/sms.png" for 127.0.0.1 at 2012-02-23 08:01:27 -0500 Served asset /home/sms.png - 304 Not Modified (0ms)

But its a 0Byte file.

I usually try a rake assets:clean:all RAILS_ENV=development RAILS_GROUPS=assets

and I usually try incrementing config.assets.version= '3' in the config/application.rb

And after a few random attempts.. images start to appear. BUT i have no clue what the magic is..

I also have deleted the public/images and other sub folders..

Do you have any thoughts/recommendations? Really killing my productivity. I should mention when images are not working /Compass continues to work like a charm

this my application.rb

42 config.filterparameters += [:password]
43 config.assets.enabled = true
44 config.sass.line_comments = false
45 config.sass.syntax = :nested
46 #config.assets.precompile << /(^[^]|\/[^])[^\/]*/
47 #http://blog.55minutes.com/2012/01/getting-compass-to-work-with-rails-31-and-32/

48 config.assets.precompile << /(^[^\/]|\/[^_])[^\/]*$/
49 config.sass.preferred_syntax = :sass
50 config.assets.version= '3'

this is my gemfile.rb

45 group :production do
46 # gem 'thin'
47 end
48
49 group :assets do
50 gem 'tilt', :git => 'git://github.com/rtomayko/tilt.git'
51 gem 'sass-rails', '~>3.2.0'
52 gem 'coffee-rails'
53 gem 'uglifier'
54 gem 'compass', '~> 0.12.alpha'
55 gem 'compass-susy-plugin', :require => 'susy'
56 gem 'compass-960-plugin'
57 gem 'fancy-buttons'
58 end

Any help would be appreciated and oh yes..i cleared my browser cache