hard coded <em> on <img> 'alt' attribute in user profile page.

When a picture is displayed in user profile its source code looks like this
<img src="//localhost/drupal/files/pictures/picture-44.png" alt="Someones picture" title="Someones picture" />

This is caused by theme_image function in theme.inc on line 540:
return '<img src="'. check_url(base_path() . $path) .'" alt="'. check_plain($alt) .'" title="'. check_plain($title) .'" '. $image_attributes . $attributes .' />';
The problem is that $path is already a full url to which base_path is appended which then looks sth like this
/drupal/http://localhost/drupal/files/pictures/picture-44.png
And then check_url strips this url into that which is later displayed.

I think this could be solved in two ways:
1. in theme_image function change return to
return '<img src="'. check_url($path) .'" alt="'. check_plain($alt) .'" title="'. check_plain($title) .'" '. $image_attributes . $attributes .' />';
2. in theme_user_picture function in user.module on line 653 change this line
$picture = file_create_url($account->picture);
to
$picture = $account->picture;