I think I understand - but I am not set up this way, so I can't verify my suggestions. Maybe you do need someone else to help.
Also read in these forums that running in https causes loading on the server, so we both need somone else to explain why it may be a security issue to stop using https when you come back to using http after https access.
My other suggestion - don't know if it will work - was to try changing the hard http links in the images_T and images_P tables in the db to remove the
http://. If you are lucky, then the generated html won't have it either, and IE may be okay with it. You could try it on one item, if it works, then you could use a sql query to update all of them at once.