Banner Ads will not Display - Image code not generated?

[gameoverbeyond]

OK, so I have been at this for a couple of days, so time to ask for help

I'm trying to set up banners in my side boxes, these will just link to different pages on my own site, not externally.
I have followed the FAQ about 10 times now to no avail. I have ensured that admin/configuration/layout settings for the 3 banner display groups is set to banner1 (just the name I'm currently on). I have the banner group in admin/banner manager set to banner1. The banner is enabled, I verified the image is in the directory set (currently /images) and the banners will not show. The sideboxes do display, header image, title, but content is empty.

I have renamed the banner(s) images multiple times, and the current name in banner manager does match the current filename.
I have tried multiple images
I switched templates to classic to ensure it was not a template issue (currently using Abbington Mega)
I have renamed, deleted, rebuilt banner groups with multiple names
I viewed the site in Firefox, IE, and Chrome, all the same.
Found some old threads, I disabled my anti-virus and all ad blockers, still not visible.
I have no errors in my error log.

I did find that when viewing the blank sidebox content with firebug, there is html generating the appropriate link, but no image display coding is there. I cannot click the "whitespace". I did verify my tpl files in the template/template_default/sideboxes directory matches the original install files. I copied these to my override folder for sideboxes, still no change.
Screenshot below.

This is on my WAMP server, I'm using 1.5.1.

Any help would be fantastic and save my sanity