I've done some more digging and it turns out timthumb doesnt work with the default permalinks (the one with the p=pagenumber) and since I cant change permalinks until I have the domain then I guess I'm stuck.

The placeholder image is loading, which means TimThumb is working. The problem you're experiencing is that the thumbs are generated from the first image uploaded to a post. When you change the domain of a site, those images are no longer considered to be "the first image uploaded".

To fix this issue, simply re-upload the images to each post.

Hope that helps.

This is for a new client who are not very web savvy at all so before making their site live, I uploaded a demo of the theme which works perfectly:
http://www.welshbockers.co.uk/forestfarm

Now I have their approval I am doing the live site. This lives on the same server as the above link, as far as I can tell everything is exactly the same. I even tried uploading the dummy content but I cannot get any timthumbs to display.
The cache folder wasn't created automatically, so I did that and chmod 777. Without any success I even tried chmod timbthumbs.php to 777.
I've deleted and recreated the cache folder several times. I'm just not getting anywhere :(

The new site is here: http://85.13.238.2/~forestf/ (and to prove its the same server as the demo site: http://85.13.238.2/~welshboc/forestfarm

I dont know what else to try. Certainly the thumbs are not being generated in the cache folder as they should.

The only difference in these sites is that the new one has the default permalinks. This is because it doesnt have a domain yet.

I appreciate this is a timthumb problem, but their support forum seems to be full of unanswered help requests and spam.

Can anyone help?

Matt