No Graphics, Only Plain Text Following a New Installation

I'm actually going to answer my question because I have seen it asked in several places with no real answer and I discovered a solution that worked for me.

I installed Elgg 1.6.1 but could not get the graphics (i.e. the default theme, or skin) to show.  Only the text of the site would show up.  It looked a mess. I tried enabling and disabling all tools, added a new theme, fiddled with some of the PHP files and folder permissions.  Nothing worked

Ultimately, what worked was taking PHP out of safe mode. 

Since my Elgg site is hosted and I did not have the ability to turn safe mode off, I contacted my web host, TSC Internet, and they set permissions for me to control PHP in cPanel on my account(Thank you, TSC Internet.  I'd post a link to their site, but I don't know if that's cool by forum rules.  This isn't meant to be spam).  My Elgg site immediately began to work correctly.

Now, I have seen a few other people post about the graphics not working after an install, and maybe there are several ways for this to happen, but I thought I would post this in case it addresses someone else's problem.