Awstats Inflates Pages Count

I've recently taken over the hosting of a large site and forum, and I want to use some for of statistics software of service so that I can determine how many unique visitors and pageviews the site and forum get (which can then be used when dealing with advertisers).

I've been using Webalizer for years, but it's not been updated in over 5 years, so it's out. I then stumbled on Awstats, which works great, but... it doesn't calculate the pageviews correctly.

At the present moment Awstats claims to have tracked approx. 2 million pageviews for the (vBulletin) forum. However, when I scroll down I notice that on number #1 in the "Pages URL Top 10" is image.php, which is used for avatars and is not a page!

Now it appears Awstats has two ways of dealing with this: the "SkipFiles" option and the "NotPageList" option. The first (SkipFiles) drops whole URLs from the stats, which isn't what I want: I just don't want them to be counted as pages.

The second (NotPageList) only accepts file extentions, not script names. This again isn't what I want: hits on showthread.php should still be counted as pages, only hits on image.php shouldn't be.

The site has a similar problem where I don't want scripts like stylesheet.php, rss.php and xml.php from being counted as pages.

My question: does anyone know a solution for this problem? Maybe a hack to allow "NotPageList" to accept script names and/or ULRs?

Alternatively: does anyone know another statistics package that's about on par or better than Awstats that can do this (and that works on Linux/Unix with logs generated by lighttpd+php-fastcgi) and that is not too expensive (max $200)?

Google Analytics isn't suitable for me (even though it would probably work well) because the site goes over 5 million pageviews/month and I don't have a Adwords account.