Dave Parrish

Most of the time turning on "Optimize CSS files" in the performace section of Drupal works great. But, for some reason, having this option turned on was causing the jquery.cycle plugin to break only on the very first load of Internet Explorer. What was happening was that the second image to transition in was being resized to about 50x50px when it should have been something like 900x300px.

Let me tell you, this was a difficult bug to test because after the first load of Internet Explorer on my machine I couldn't test any more. At first I tried using online website screenshot services to test the bug but they also ONLY were only getting the error on the first screenshot. Eventually I had to go to the trusty virtual machine testing approach using Virutal PC loaded with Vista.

As I said earlier, the only thing I had to change was the Optimize CSS files: from Enabled to Disabled under the /admin/settings/performance settings. I wish I would have tried this about 8 hours earlier!

This was one of the strangest bugs I have ever seen as a web developer. It ONLY occured on the VERY first load of IE8 or IE7. All other browsers worked fine and IE worked fine MOST of the time. Even after clearing the cache for IE I could not reproduce the bug. What craziness is IE doing to cause the bug to occur only on the first load. Is there a cache somewhere I don't know about? Maybe it was a race condition error? I never figure it out.