are you sure that ie6 caches images locally?

Question

i have a asp.net-mvc site and i have the same image referenced on the site about 1000 times. In all other browsers (ie7+, ff, etc) the pages loads in less than a second.

in IE6, it says . .

(1000 items remaining. . )
(999 items remaining. . )
(998 items remaining. . )
(997 items remaining. . )
etc . .

and linearly does a single countdown to 0.

If ie6 is caching these images and since its the same image, just:

 <img src='../../test.png'>

why would it do this countdown. The IE 6 takes about 3 minutes to load, where, as mentioned, other browsers are less than a second.

any suggestions?

EDIT:

i also have the following code for the transparent PNG issue. I am not sure if this is related but wanted to mentioned it, if it was.

 <!--[if lte IE 6]>
   <link href="../../Content/iefix/Site_ie6.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
    <style type="text/css">
        img, div { behavior: url(../../Content/iefix/iepngfix.htc) }
    </style>
    <script type="text/javascript" src="../../Scripts/iepngfix_tilebg.js"></script>
<![endif]-->

Answer 1

Yes, IE6 caches locally, provided the HTTP headers are set correctly.

What do your HTTP headers look like? You can see them with a web debugger such as Fiddler.

There are some known bugs in IE6 that relate to the way it caches HTC files (such as the one referenced in the code fragment you posted): they can get loaded twice, even when caching is enabled.

Answer 2

pngfix is definitely the problem. It has to, one by one, re-render each one of those images after they've loaded. Use with care!

Try removing pngfix and see if your speed increases, or do some profiling - log the time before and after the execution of pngfix.