Hello, I've only seen this happen when testing in IE 7 or 8 from a Windows Server 2008 R2 box. I've tested on Windows 7 and it works fine. Other browsers are fine.
So I have a very simple bare bones test page with a link to an external stylesheet that sets a background image on the body (could be a div too). If there is a ul, ol or table tag within the page IE fails to load the background image and continuously tries to load it. So you will see the "downloading" message in the status bar and see the blue circular load image in the tab. Also, this will only happen if the image is already in the cache and IE doesn't make a conditional request for the image. I've coincidentally seen this happen on the httpwatch site while going there to get their tool to help me solve this issue. Kind of funny. But here's an example of a page:
<html>
<head>
<title></title>
<link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="/base_css/ietest.css" />
</head>
<body>
<ul><li>hi</li></ul>
</body>
</html>
stylesheet:
body
{
background: url(/images/yourimage.gif);
}
Its fairly consistent on load of the page or if you open a new tab and paste in the url. If you refresh the page it works fine but when you invoke a refresh you are making a conditional request. So I don't know if its some weird IE,css,rendering issue or there's a problem with IE trying to grab an image directly from the cache without making any requests for it. And the ul,ol,table condition is bizarre and makes me wonder about my sanity.
Thanks for any help on this. I know it's a fringe case.