Hi, I too have disabled Contact Form 7 CSS but found that the template author hard-coded Contact Form 7 CSS that was overriding. Just wanted to share this odd finding in case someone else has this issue.
Dan,
I was able to solve this issue. The pathing needed an adjustment but the real issue was that GD was not configured to run under PHP. I went into the PHP.ini file and uncommented the GD line and that solved the problem.