Disapearing Icons???

I have a plugin I wrote to auto join new members to a State group based on the input they provide during profile update.

As far as the functions of the plugin everything works great, members and groups are joined every time, but with the plugin enabled all of my sites Icons disappear into the little red X...

I read somewhere that this could be caused by UTF-8 BOM and when I first wrote the code I did use MS word so I went back and rewrote it all using the editor in cpanel to make sure but still have the problem.

I built this plugin along the same lines as the plugin autosubscribegroups where the code is in the start.php file, and I'm not sure if 1.7 has a problem with that since it requires security tokens, but I would love to hear some ideas about what could be causing my Icons to dissapear.

As always Thanks to everyone who is stepping me through this learning curve