JQuery is killing the lightbox

I just moved my javascript to jQuery for simple AJAX functions. However, I am trying to use a lightbox plugin with jQuery as I want to keep the same functionality, but don't want to include 10 different libraries. If I remove the jquery include and keep the lightbox it works fine if I return it it breaks it just displays the full size image instead of the window, neither chrome nor firefox console complain about anything, it just goes straight to the image I tried using 5 different clones / plugins for jQuery, but they all gave me the same behavior which made me think I was missing something

right now my headers look like this (double checked, they're all there):

<script type='text/javascript' src='js/jquery.js'></script>
<script type='text/javascript' src='js/thickbox.js'></script>
<link rel='stylesheet' type='text/css' href='css/thickbox.css' />

      

        
        
        
      

    

and my gallery (php):

foreach(...){
echo "<a href=\"$path\" class='thickbox' rel='$folder'><img border=none src=\"$thumb\" /></a>&nbsp;\n" ;
}

      

        
        
        
      

    

for the background, the images in the foreach are loaded from the ajax call, but that was never a problem for lightbox, it shouldn't be because all the html is all the same