Website Page Display Question

telecomops101

A friend of mine is having a problem with some of the websites he visits. The problem is not all of the page is being displayed. For example when he goes to cnn.com or mets.com, most of the page is displayed , but there is usually one part that contains the error that the page cannot be displayed. I went to internet options, advanced and under multimedia i checked off the option to Show Image Dowload Placeholders. When I did this the part of the page on cnn that was missing was now dispalyed. After I rebooted the computer the problem came back. Can ayone give me some help with this. He is running IE 7. Thanks

JDMurray

Does he have anything in his HOSTS file? This file is used to control how a network program (like a Web browser) resolves specific IP addresses. On a Windows system, this file is in C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc and is named "hosts" with no extension. I use a HOSTS file to block known Spyware sites, and this causes many ads not to appear in my Web browser just as you describe.

Dan Pollack's Using a Hosts File To Make The Internet Not Suck (as much) (0.0.0.0 version)

sprkymrk

Another possibility is that CNN, Yahoo, Microsoft and others all use several (hundred) commercial servers (akamai or something) to host a lot of their content like images and such. If any of these servers are blocked, down or unreachable, the images stored on them won't display. I run into this a lot on .mil networks, as the Army will place temporary blocks on IP's (sometimes entire class C or B networks) on which they detect suspicious or malicious activity. So if/when one or more of these servers that host images for sites like CNN or Yahoo get compromised, we end up with "half loaded" pages on a lot of common sites.

telecomops101

I checked and there are no files listed in is HOST file. Also his machine is the only on that has this problem with partially loaded web pages. He said it started happening after he downloaded IE 7.

sprkymrk

Try going to Tools, Internet Options, Security and "Reset all zones to default level".

JDMurray

If resetting the Internet security settings doesn't work, check if this same behavior happens in another Web browsers (like FireFox) installed on the computer. That'll tell if this problem is specific to IE7.