You could disable the EXIF functions in PHP, but the whole idea of EXIF rotation is it should be rotating it the correct way up. This isn't the first time I've seen someone report this.
@Chris D , sorry to revive an old topic, but I'm having issues where a lot of my Android user's images are not oriented correctly. I've looked at the EXIF data of a few of them and it's because the pixels are reported backwards for orientation, but everything I've found other than this post involve hacking the core files and then redoing the hack everytime an update is released which I'd really rather not do.
Does this avoid that now in 1.4.x?
Either way, for some reason when I go to that URL for my site it just displays the ACP tools page menu without any CSS applied to it.