Laptop won't display ANY background images

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Laptop won't display ANY background images

Problem persists even after installing new browser.

Demaestro

3:35 pm on Apr 22, 2008 (gmt 0)

Hey all,

So my friend has this Dell laptop running XP, I did a little website for his DJing and when I showed it to him I noticed the background images weren't loading.

I brought it up and he said it didn't for any site. I thought that was weird but I went to multiple websites and they all won't load the bg-images... I did some searching and poked around with stuff like the content adviser and all the other settings I could find in Internet Options and other places.... nothing helped.

So I installed Firefox thinking that it must just be IE. But no... FF also won't display the images.

Now he got this laptop right from Dell and it has all these "helper apps". So thinking it could be one of them I tried in safe mode with networking but sill no background images... I am at a loss to explain but I spent over two hours messing with it and searching online but nothing.

Anybody out there have an idea what this could be?

[edited by: Demaestro at 3:36 pm (utc) on April 22, 2008]

kaled

7:02 pm on Apr 22, 2008 (gmt 0)

Probably some crappy piece of junk masquerading as a Firewall.

Kaled.

bill

5:12 am on Apr 23, 2008 (gmt 0)

Agreed. Look at 3rd party apps and firewalls. Try a clean boot [support.microsoft.com] and see whether the images show up. You may be able to find the culprit and stop it from starting up the next time you boot the machine.

Hester

9:34 am on Apr 23, 2008 (gmt 0)

Norton?

Receptional Andy

9:39 am on Apr 23, 2008 (gmt 0)

Can you access background images if you visit their URLs directly?

g1smd

11:19 am on Apr 23, 2008 (gmt 0)

What is the pixel size of the images?

Certain advert removers (and Norton Security) remove images of a certain size from view.

Demaestro

12:57 pm on Apr 23, 2008 (gmt 0)

Great thoughts all, thanks..

I will try some of these and report back later. I have to get my hands on this stupid machine again.

I think Norton is running, and I will try hitting the URL directly of the images.

[edited by: Demaestro at 12:58 pm (utc) on April 23, 2008]

Hester

2:26 pm on Apr 24, 2008 (gmt 0)

Norton is a reknowned culprit in these situations. Try uninstalling it and see if that helps.

Demaestro

4:04 am on Apr 25, 2008 (gmt 0)

No Norton.. never has been, I reset all the internet options and disabled third party extensions, it didn't help.

If I right click in FF and try to view background image it doesn't do anything. Some background images are referenced in css files some aren't but even with developer tool-bar asking to outline background images shows nothing. Asking for image info with developer toolbar only shows the handful of images that got through to page load. Hitting those images directly shows them.

Ran virus scans, ran adware and spybot.

The only new info I have is it was bought with Vista and had XP installed. Even got the actual guy from Dell who sold it to them on the phone and all he suggested was disallowing third party extensions in Internet options.

I turned off Windows Firewall, the only one enabled, AVG free is the anti virus. I am ready to pull all his files off and reinstall the OS but I am sorried about the product key because the OEM sticker is a Vista product key.

What to do?

bill

5:32 am on Apr 25, 2008 (gmt 0)

Did you try the clean boot method I suggested above?

kaled

11:02 am on Apr 25, 2008 (gmt 0)

You need to view the source code (as delivered to the browser) to see what's going on. If the html and css are correct you can test to see if the images themselves are being filtered out by entering their urls directly.

Typically, if code is being rewritten, comments are inserted to identify the program responsible.

Kaled.

Demaestro

5:01 pm on Apr 25, 2008 (gmt 0)

bill somehow I read that as safe mode.... I will try that next....

kaled, that is a good idea.... I got too frustrated last night to continue but I told them I would come over tomorrow and they are making me lunch!

I am going to set up a nice easy test page with images served in different manners and clean css and html so I can see easily what the source code is telling me.

Thanks everyone.. I will report back.