IE sometimes not showing images

On popular sites

[mcavic]

I'm using IE6, Win98 on a Level3 dialup connection. All of a sudden, when I visit certain sites like Yahoo Finance, Google, and my bank, some or all of the images don't show up. But on other sites, they do. If I hit the images directly, they're there.

This happened a few months ago, and it went away and I forgot about it. Anyone had this happen? I've cleared my cache to no effect, and also tried switching from Level3 to Dialsprint.

[tedster]

I've been wrestling with somewhat similar behavior since last spring - also with IE6 on a Win98se machine. However, what I see when it kicks in is no images at all and no external css files. I've suspected lots of things -- some conflict with another bit of software, perhaps something that taps the IE rendering engine, or Norton/Symantec A_V and firewall, even Photoshop jpgs with embedded xml data -- but I finally gave up wrestling with it.

A reboot fixes the issue for me, but only temporarily. And even reformatting my computer with a total re-install of all software did not make for a permanent fix. After I put in hours reading about related bugs on microsoft.com and elsewhere, I finally called it quits, but I'd certainly love to know what's going on here.

This problem shows on a Sony VAIO laptop for me -- and now I'm susupecting some of their multi-media fancy dancing is creating the conflict. However, it's all guesswork, and in the meantime, I know I need to reboot before I test my work in IE.

It's frustrating, but it sure broke me of my Google Toolbar obsession!

[mcavic]

Hmm. I turned off my machine last night, and upon booting, it was fixed. I ran Ad-aware, and it removed a browser hijacker and some other stuff. Will see if the problem returns. Thanks for the reply!

[MatthewHSE]

I've seen this before too. In my case it happened only with images on my own site. Turned out to be temporary DNS issues between my local ISP and our server. That got resolved and I've never seen it since.

But then I know at least one other person has seen this and it didn't seem to be DNS. So who knows . . .

[4serendipity]

I've recently been experiencing a similar problem. In my case I can get images and external style sheets to show up my deselecting and reselecting auto-select on the encoding right-click menu.

I've noticed that in my case the sites whose images don't show up are those the send a character encoding in the http header.