By repairing IE some have had success in curing this activity.

Add/Remove programs/MS/IE repair...

If still no joy then read this. The registry may be corrupt, .nls files
missing etc...

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 (i. e. 5, 6.
W95/98/se/ME/NT4/W2000/XP 9/19/2003)

Henri:

Bet you'll never guess what!  I fixed my own problem.

Basically, I followed the instructions in the Microsoft Bulletin 283807 you
referenced above
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.

c_1252 is the code table for Western European (Windows)
c_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 c_1252 might just work.

After rebooting, the problem was history.

Also, its not really obvious from the Microsoft 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,
Source: John Mann