  Optical and near-IR Hubble Space Telescope and Gemini-North adaptive optics
images, further improved through deconvolution, are used to explore the
gravitationally lensed radio source PKS 1830-211. The line of sight to the
quasar at z=2.507 appears to be very busy, with the presence, within 0.5 arcsec
from the source of: (i) a possible galactic main-sequence star, (ii) a faint
red lensing galaxy visible only in H-band and (iii) a new object whose colors
and morphology match those of an almost face-on spiral. The V-I color and faint
I magnitude of the latter suggest that it is associated with the molecular
absorber seen towards PKS 1830-211, at z=0.89 rather than with the z=0.19 HI
absorber previously reported in the spectrum of PKS 1830-211. While this
discovery might ease the interpretation of the observed absorption lines, it
also complicates the modeling of the lensing potential well, hence decreasing
the interest in using this system as a mean to measure H_0 through the time
delay between the lensed images. This is the first case of a quasar lensed by
an almost face-on spiral galaxy.
