Thank you for your help!
This occurs on a site with WP caching and another site without; neither uses any image re-sizing plugin other than the native WP creation of image thumbnails. These are both ‘legacy’ sites which have been using “WP Custom Links” for quite some time. When I just installed the plugin on a third site which has never used it, I do NOT observe this odd behavior.
The only other difference is that the two sites exhibiting the problem do NOT have the images organized into year/month folders, while the site without problems DOES.
I have tried deactivating/uninstalling/reinstalling the plugin from the two sites exhibiting the problem, and the odd behavior resumed. Is there a way to *completely* delete/reinstall the plugin?
Thanks!