And the design images displayed fine in my browser.
About the ini problems, ezp needs write permission on settings/*, var/*, design/* (for overrides) and extension/* ( for installing extension from admin )
You can chmod 777 <b>var</b> directory, clear the cache manually
rm -rf var/cache
rm -rf var/site_extension/cache
by hand, create a new content object and add it a new image, if it doesn't show, then look at the logs files <b>var/log/error.log</b>,<b>var/log/warning.log</b>, and search for any error or warning related to this problem