Anyone have ideas for solving the "n items remaining" problem on Internet Explorer?

IF you use behaviors ANYWHERE in your code (or a library you use uses them) e.g.

<style>  body * {    behavior:url(anyfile.htc);  }</style>

Then there is NO solution that I'm aware of and the bug report filed in IE Feedback on Connect for IE8 (and IE7) was rejected for both releases with the following blanket canned statement:

This is a known bug in IE and also happens in previous IE versions. The reason that you see hundreds of requests in the status bar is because IE attemps to read the htc file from disk over and over again for each element on the page. Unfortunately, at this time we do not plan on fixing this. We will consider this in the future version of IE.

Best regards, The IE Team

Since this is the same reply received for IE7 development I wouldn't hold my breath on EVER having this fixed.

Update:

One additional thought based on your update notes. If the page isn't quite responsive, as if it is still loading something, check the rendered DOM content for any calls to document.write() {you may not have added them, but a lib might have}.

If they exist, try adding a document.close(); statement after they are complete, this will tell the browser you are "done" rendering.

PS here is a link you can save as a bookmark (right-click "Add to favorites...") that will show you the generated DOM as IE sees it (an ugly quoteLess=CaMelCaSeMeSS) do a search on the result to find any quirky code that might be causing issues.

IE Generated Source: (add this as the location for any bookmark, the editor won't let me link it up)

javascript:'<xmp>'+window.document.body.parentNode.outerHTML+'</xmp>';

I have had a similar issue before, and it was due to a long running JS piece that was in the middle of the page, the browser was waiting for it to finish executing before it would finish downloading the additional files for the site.

I'm not sure if this is an issue for you or not, but it had manifested itself in a similar manner.

With regards to caching images, I had to use an HTTP handler to get the images to cache correctly. Specifically, there was a picture of an arrow in a CSS menu that would cause the exact behavior you're dealing with since it was used multiple times in each menu.

Here is the code for the handler: http://www.groovybits.com/SrcViewer.aspx?inspect=~/PersistantImage.ashx

You use it by adding an AppSetting in web.config:

<add key="UniqueImageName" value="~/Images/image_name.gif"/>

And reference the source of each image using the handler instead of the path to the image itself:

~/Handlers/PersistantImage.ashx?key=UniqueImageName