Issue on SharePoint Page load (http load) - failing to download necessary images

Question

We have been seeing this weird issue of certain "_Layouts/images/formtitlegrad.gif" failing to download message on right o the IE status bar. See attached pic.

This is a regular SharePoint web part page with a custom web part on it. The web part is populated with all its data even as we see the above message. On refreshing the page it loads the images successfully.

The issue could be duplicated only on the first instance of a browser (when you close the browser and open it, you will see the issue. once you refresh the browser the issue is gone). And this happens only on very few specific pages.

I have been using the fiddler to verify the headers being passed and how the cache is responding, <META HTTP-EQUIV="Expires" content="0"> on master page is doing fine I believe. 

Also initially I thought this could be IE 8 compatibility issue, but even with IE=IE 7 enumerable tags we still see this issue.

Any pointers on how to further investigate this issue would be helpful.

Thanks,

MaSh



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-Mash "http://sharepointxperiments.wordpress.com"