Really annoying IE8 bug

Losing (part of) the body background image - sometimes

[FranticFish]

This isn't happening in ANY browser (even IE browsers) except IE8.

What happens is that every 7th or 8th page view on a site I'm building, IE will freeze before it renders the whole background image. Mousing over a link will then cause the image to load. It never drops the bgcolor I have set, just the image... sometimes.

Anyone have a clue why?

[FranticFish]

Found a fix. Move the background image from 'body' to 'html'.

[penders]

That is a weird fix - thanks for sharing! Although I can't help but feel there is something a tad more complex/weird going on?!

TBH, I have a lot of intermittent problems with IE8 seemingly freezing [webmasterworld.com] and refusing to load pages. Any page, any website - no particular pattern as far as I can see. Some days it's OK; some days it's not!?

[ukzembla]

Hey, I had the same problem where I had a 1px wide, 800px high gif in the body background with repeat-x. Looked great on everything except IE8 *sometimes*. I could just look at the same page, which was super-lightweight, and keep pressing refresh, and sometimes (maybe 1 time in 15) it'd screw up the background (not fill it in properly, using bits of background colour instead of the image, but in a sort of patchy way).

Putting the background image in 'html' didn't work either but I put the background-color in html and the image in body, and that seemed to do the trick.

Is this a recognised bug? I don't get it on any other browsers.

- Alex

[drhowarddrfine]

See if anything on this list [haslayout.net] fits what you're doing.