AH HA!
The issue is the ability for users to add in their own image.
I deleted these links and voila! the markers showed up!
To prevent any users from entering this and screwing up the map again, I did the following:
in template: vbgooglemapme_display_yourlocation and vbgooglemapme_set_yourlocation
find and delete:
Code:
<td class="alt2" align="left" valign="top">$vbphrase[vbgooglemapme_imgurl]</td>
<td class="alt1" align="left"><input name="pimage" size="20" value="$pimage" style="padding-left:5px; font-weight:normal; width:200px;"></td>
This completely removes the text and the box from showing on the pages which will prevent ANY user from entering that information, which would subsequently cause the plug-in to crash.
I hope this helps some others!
All I did to figure this out was to search the phrases for for the text that was shown there to find out how it was called, then I just searched all the templates for that call.