too bizarre to comprehend!!!

ok... I am close to committing my self to the nut house after spending days on this very bizarre problem... too hard to really describe well; but will give it a shot.

- Drupal 4.7

- I started hacking up the box_grey template and css to make a completely tableless CSS layout

- was pretty close .. then WHAM!!! something happened

- I have stripped almost everything out of my page.tpl.php so that all I am left with is a few DIVs holding a few IMGs.. and NOTHING else - no borders, no content - nothing.

- so, if I am not mistaken... if I go to any page (by typing in url on address because I have no content on my page to select links from) - I should see my simple page.tpl.php - RIGHT????

and sure enough at mysite/admin I get the following screenshot:

www.allanalog.com/admin.jpg

all seems cool!!

however; if I go to a NODE (mysite/node/19) ... I get the browser taking very long to draw out a completely corrupted page with all images missing:

www.allanalog.com/node.jpg

NOW.. if this wasn't odd enough... if I do a view source on the corrupted page.. it looks fine... AND... if I save this source to an html file and load that.. it looks fine...

and one more thing to add to the insanity... I think this may have all started when in installed the categories module... and I think that if I return to a database which has not had the categories.mysql addition done.. then this all works fine....

but still.. how can ANY module or ANY database change be affecting this????