Joomla Virtuemart SEF Breadcrumb issues

I’ve got a virtuemart cart (1.1.4 with joomla 1.5) that I’ve inherited and I’m helping my developer trouble shoot some issues we are having with the interaction of child products/attributes, SEF, broken breadcrumbs and missing pictures.

The store is at http://www.pitchinforagoodcause.org/index.php/buy-gkr-souvenirs.html.
Take a look specifically at the women’s boutique, chose a shirt size and watch what happens. I don’t want it to do that – insert the attribute name into the breadcrumb, break the breadcrumb and break the links/lightbox to the detail images.

I also don’t want to loose the child products - the client can keep a more accurate inventory with them

I found this article that describes how AJAX may be screwing things up with a work around: http://mertonium.com/2010/01/sh404sef-virtuemart-ajax/. My developer tried the work around but it didn’t change anything. Does anyone have another suggestions?

The product image issue is because the response to the ajax request is not returning absolute urls to the image, so it’s looking for them after the fake directory structure.

e.g. should be
/images/stories/tee_images/i-wait-for-gary-call_blue_small.jpg

But is coming back

images/stories/tee_images/i-wait-for-gary-call_blue_small.jpg

That slash at the beginning means it’s actually looking for it in the current folder (which doesn’t actually exists as it’s a rewritten url)

Woman-s-Boutique/T.-Heyman-Tees-I-wait-for-Gary-s-Call/images/stories/tee_images/i-wait-for-gary-call_blue_small.jpg

Not too sure about the breadcrumb stuff though