Im proud to release my new magazine / news style wordpress theme – newspress. It’s built under 960 grid system and packed with in-demand features such as featured post, dropdown menu, social bookmarks button, etc. This is totally a free theme as long as footer links must keep intact.
http://www.binarymoon.co.uk/2009/10/timthumb-wordpress-mu/
Has a solution for getting timthumb to work with WordPress MU and may solve some of the broken images.
Note that the code listed must be modified from Image to image_value.
Nymdok