You could be missing some .nls files or the registry is corrupt.
Check this article for some clues.
Pictures Are Not Displayed on Web Sites in Internet Explorer
A Web page may display an image as a red X, or a placeholder may appear in
place of the image.
Covers also this problem: Web page that is encoded for the Western European
(ISO) code page might not display any images:
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=283807
--
This is from correspondence I received recently, I did not have the time to
edit and post it on my site.
Read it carefully and if you feel confident make the change to your registry
in accordance with your operating system.
Quote
Henri:
Bet you'll never guess what! I fixed my own problem.
Basically, I followed the instructions in the MSoft
Bulletin 283807 you referenced below to change the code
table specified in my registry EXCEPT.... instead of
specifying the c_28591.nls as the default, I changed the
default to c_1252.nls. Note that I am using IE6.0 and
Windows XP Pro.
1252 is the code table for Western European (Windows)
28591 is the code table for Western European (ISO)
Since the problem goes away temporarily by changing the
view encoding to the (Windows) version not the (ISO)
version, I reasoned that 1252 might just work.
After rebooting, the problem was history.
Also, its not really obvious from the MSoft bulletin that
the registry line that needs to be changed is the first
line in that section of the registry. In this case, this
is the default code that will be used. This said, it
beats the heck out of me as to why the registry default
setting should "over-ride" the setting specified in the
web page itself! Oh well, it worked.
So, it turns out the problem was simple after all. Sure
glad I didn't resort to reloading windows!
You'll probably want to add a reference to this discovery
on your web site, but don't forget to tell folks to back
up their registry (Or do a System Restore Save Point),
and then to reboot after making the change.
John Mann
Follow up:
Don't forget that the code file for Western European
(Windows) for Windows 98 and Windows ME is "cp_1252.nls"
instead of the equivalent file "c_1252.nls" that I used
for NT 2K and XP.
For what its worth, my other two computers (Windows ME and
Windows 2K) have no default specified at the beginning of
the registry code table section but yet, they both work
fine. To me, that means that there is something else
wrong with my XP system. None-the-less, the change I made
does appear to be working fine. I have had no further
problems.
Good Luck,
John Mann
Unquote.
Henri Leboeuf
Web page:
http://www.generation.net/~hleboeuf/index.htm