Why won't an image load multiple times on same page?

I have an image that is meant to load many times (10) on a page (just like the little envelopes on the left-hand side of the preceding page of this site) but at seemingly random times the image refuses to load. I get 10 little empty X boxes instead. What gives?

On the server side: it's just a small GIF in a normal html file. Server is Win 2000, IIS 5.0.

Client is Win XP with latest Explorer.

It doesn’t matter if the page is made dynamically or is static, https or http, I get the same problem on all pages at different times. Sometimes everything loads just fine, sometimes it doesn’t. The links are all relative, not absolute. They need to be because sometimes the pages are secure and sometimes not, and I don’t want the “loading secure and non-secure items” warning message that would accompany the absolute http links on a secure page.

When I refresh though, the image loads just fine. (cache issue?)

On the server side I’ve tested the image in different directories and tried other substitute images, all with the same result. The only way I’ve fixed it is to make 10 copies of the image with different names and load them each – not very efficient.

If I’m having this problem viewing my website then so are other people. Actually I had this problem when viewing this site’s preceding page. All the little envelope images on the left side didn’t load, until I refreshed.

Is it just me? Does Explorer have issues when loading many occurrences of the same image. Has anyone else experienced this.

Thanks.

funkyville,

I've seen this behavior too. I'm not certain, but it seems to be happening when the web server isn't serving up the images as fast as the browser would like.

You could try theory out by serving the pages and images off of an Apache server and seeing if you have the same results. Apache has a very nice Windows version that should make testing easy, so this won't take a huge effort. Just give it the same document root as you gave IIS and you're golden.