Sharepoint 2010 - image url directed to wrong location only for certain users (permissions?)

Question

I'm new to Sharepoint, so apologies in advance for my lack of knowledge on the software. My company is using SP 2010 and on the home page of our site, there is a small help icon in the top-right corner of the page. By viewing the source html for this icon, when loaded correctly the url for the image is at a relative location in the _layouts folder (the image is fgimg.png). The issue is that when certain users access the page the image does not load and instead tries to pull from an absolute url pointing to a deprecated location that we used to use but is now empty.

Best case scenario, this results in the particular image simply not loading, worst case (in one particularly remote branch of the business) the page stalls out for about 15 seconds waiting for the image to load and then finally aborts before the rest of the page loads successfully. It appears that the users that get the correct file location are all in the "designer" group and have permissions to edit the page. Users below this permissions level receive the incorrect url.

Being new to sharepoint, I don't really know where to begin looking for a solution. The master page has the correct (relative) url. Could this be a javascript issue changing the url (that's what one of my coworkers thinks)?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!!!

Answer 1

This looks like the master page has not been published after the link to the image was changed. Especially the fact that people with design access can see the correct image, points to that as the reason.

The regular user will see the last major version of the master page.

Make sure to publish the master page with the correct link as a major version.