I just lost about 4 hours on a really stupid problem. My images on the local server were somehow broken and therefore did not display in the browsers. After much looking around and testing, including re-installing apache on my computer a couple of times, I traced the problem to an included file.
No the problem was not a whitespace, but the UTF BOM encoding character at the begining of one of my inluded files...
So beware of your included files!
Make sure they are not encoded in UTF or otherwise in UTF without BOM.
Hope it save someone's time.
