aparently THIS IS A JPEG... I look through some others coredups and its always images treated as a php and passed to PHP. Strangely enough this seams to be killing nginx not php processes.

So i think we've nailed the problem, i'll wait 24h to se if everything is ok and report here.

But this should rise discussion about recognition of php files by nginx and $fastcgi_script_name doesnt do the trick. I have to do rewrites for SMF to make it compatible with apache.

it's doable but multiple ifs are needed to check if full request name exists and then pass "file.php/blabla.a44.ext" as a php script:
if ( !-f $request_filename && $request_filename ~* \.php(.*)$ ) - that should work as supposed (apache compatible).