IE6 sometimes not loading stylesheet

Question

Hi

We are having a problem where IE6 (the only browser we have noticed this happening on) seems to be caching an empty version of our main stylesheet. The only way to resolve the problem is to request the stylesheet directly by typing the its url directly into the browser, and then when you refresh the page, it will appear with the styles. About a week or so later, it will happen again.

This isn't happening to all users, but we can't figure out why it is happening.

We are running IIS on Server 2003, and this problem started happening a couple of months ago (never had any problems before that).

I appreciate any help you can offer.

Paul

*I have looked closer and now it is doing the same for certain Javascripts as well.

• 12-12-2008

Thanks for the help Grant, IE is fairly locked down, but have checked what can be changed and it is fine, and no extra plug-ins are installed.

If you Ctrl-F5 or kill the temp files it doesn't seem to do anything. It's not until you request the file directly that it actually it actually fixes the problem which does indicate that there is a problem with IE caching a broken or empty version. Unfortunately, I must now wait until it happens again and I'm going to check the log files on the server.

Again thanks for the help.

Answer 1

Hi. I also had the same behaviour once. However, I was using a php generated stylesheet, with the headers and every other information (client-side cache, server-side cache, compression) finely tuned in PHP for optimal performance.

Worked like a charm, but it seemed that IE6 did not load the stylesheets on some computers, in a non-reproducible way. I didn't have the time to investigate,and I didn't have access to the problematic computers, so we went back to plain-old simple stylesheets, and everything went back to normal. We said it was firewall-related, but I'm sure there's something nasty hiding inside IE6.

I beg to know what it is...

Answer 2

I can't give you a direct answer, but I would start by installing Fiddler and investigating the Content-type and last-modified response headers of the files that are causing you problems.

Also take note of the If-Modified-Since and Pragma request header values.

As well, I would check the Accessibility settings in IE (Tools > Internet Options... > Accessibility).

In addition, ensure they haven't installed any add-ons that might be causing this type of behaviour. An unrelated example: a couple of years ago, we had a problem where IE6 stopped sharing Session cookies between browser windows for one of our users. It turned out to be some cursor add-on to IE causing the problem.

Obviously if your users are using a locked down copy of IE, the above suggestions don't apply.

Lastly, what happens if the user holds CTRL and hits F5 to refresh the page unconditionally, do they get the latest copy of the stylesheet and JavaScript files then? And have you tried clearing the browser history completely and loading a fresh copy of the page (perhaps the cache itself is corrupt somehow)?