I'm having a similar problem in the admin area. The language buttons are missing. I'm not sure where I should look; but, whatever code is there is not printing out a path to an image, only to the containing directory:

HTML Code:
/includes/languages/english/images/
<!-- instead of -->
/includes/languages/english/images/icon.gif
I read an old, closed and unresolved, post from 2009 that mentioned the problem appearing when adding ssl. I can't imagine why that would matter.

If anyone has any thoughts, I'm all ears!

Thank you!