When Internet Explorer Erases Bookmark Icons

When you add a web site to your Favorites in IE6, if there's a favicon for it, that graphic will be drawn on the menu next to the name of the Favorite, which is pretty cool. But I noticed that over time those icons disappear - and I wasn't sure why.

Quitting and rerunning IE didn't affect it. Rebooting didn't affect it. But I finally figured it out.

If you go to Internet Options and Delete Temporary Files, and check the "erase offline content" box - that wipes out all the menu icons for all web sites you've bookmarked so far.

That seems wrong to me. A menu icon has nothing to do with offline content, in my mind. I guess those icons are physically stored in the Offline Content folder, wherever that lives under Windows XP.

It just seems to me like they should store them separately - and never wipe them out. And, if you visit a web site that has a favicon different from the one displayed, it should download it and display it! That never seems to happen with IE6 even though it pings the web server to check on the favicon.ico file.

There's a number of weird bugs going on here. I hope they fixed them in IE7.