leegreen, did you pick up the final hot-fixed EE2 fileset, after 9pm EST last night?
It’s a somewhat wild off-map guess, but this looks a little like what was happening with some global variables which, like your {image-1}, involved EE working up an automatic path.
That’s for the part about the variable just disappearing, and you can find out easily if replacing your files with a re-downloaded set helps.
As far as different results depending on HTML nearby, that would probably be different. Is your unspecified WYSIWYG editor noted as ready for EE2.2? Though most add-ons seem fine, an editor is quite a complicated place, and could easily have issues.
I’d have a look on the support site for this editor, and see if others are having problems, or you can post yours. Looking in this way is how I found what Pixel&Tonic; had had to work around (successfully) in some recent EE moves concerning thumbnails, and then I could see how to normalize mine to be fine again with Matrix.
Just stepping in a moment, and hope it might move you forward for the evening anyway, if there’s anything to the thoughts.
Clive