favicon requests w/o anything else

One off requests for favicon from MSIE 6.0

[larryn]

I've been looking at logs and found 41 seperate requests for /favicon.ico that didn't request the page or any other files from the site on the same day.

We use session ID's, so its expected that the IP might change, but their browser (consistently MSIE 5.5 or 6.0 on NT 5.x) just asked for the icon and thats all. Likewise, I checked the log for just the IP and there were no matching (in case someone was declining cookies). These requests were truly one offs...

Trying to learn more, I searched the forums here, and there was a reference from late 2002 to Gecko based browsers not caching their tabs - but does anyone know of similiar behavior by MSIE?

Thanks for your thoughts...

Here are some examples from the log: 
ID: 63.232.144.67.181481071955920474 
IP: 63.232.145.79 
Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.0.3705; MSN 8.0; MSN 8.5; MSNbMSNI; MSNmen-us; MSNcIA) 
Stat: 200 
Time: 01/06/04 15:29:24 
Ref: - 
Request: /favicon.ico 
ID: 207.95.228.84.2582107046777078 
IP: 206.214.0.61 
Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; YComp 5.0.2.4; (R1 1.3); MSN 8.0; MSN 8.5; MSNbMSNI; MSNmen-us; MSNcIA) 
Stat: 200 
Time: 01/06/04 15:46:37 
Ref: -  
Request: /favicon.ico 
ID: 138.89.119.251.4681072587901812 
IP: 141.153.137.186 
Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98; Win 9x 4.90; YComp 5.0.2.5; MSN 8.0; MSN 8.5; MSNbVZ02; MSNmen-us; MSNcIA) 
Stat: 200 
Time: 01/06/04 15:54:23 
Ref: - 
Request: /favicon.ico 

[jim_w]

Yea, I’m seeing the same thing. They are all coming from Microsoft IPs. I don’t know if it someone at MS updating their browser settings or something, or if MS has cached pages on some server somewhere. Not having the favicon.ico cached, if someone bookmarks the page, it fetches favicon.ico. I’m getting about 7 a day or so, all with different MS IPs. No pages viewed, just favicon.ico fetched.

Beats me.

[dcrombie]

There are a number of browser plug-ins that refresh the Favourites icons so they don't revert to the default when the cache expires.