Thank you Ivo Apostolov!! I had the same issue with no stars showing up (or rss feed icons, or tweet this icons, etc, etc).
I thought I'd get fancy and assign specific templates to various category levels. What I missed (and didn't really understand until now) was the relative paths of the images in my my css template files and my impact on adding custom css files. So you not only fixed my issue, you also forced me to go off and truly understand relative paths.
Thank you!