IE8: random images, videos not downloading

Quite often when I visit a website, pictures and videos are displayed as an empty box/frame with a placeholder. But clicking on the placeholder doesn't give me the usual context menu with the "display image" option, it just gives me the regular "Back/forward/save background, etc., etc." context menu.
Even on my own tumblr blog, images are often first displayed as an empty frame without even a placeholder icon; in this case a refresh with Ctrl-F5 will normally bring them up, but that doesn't work on any other site.
This has only started happening recently, and I'm not aware of any tweaking to my system which I might have done to provoke it. Also, I've tried looking at the HTML source of the offending pages, but I can't identify anything these problem images or videos have in common - others display normally. As far as I can tell, it's completely random, but it's been happening quite a lot recently, maybe 10% - 15% of the total images not displaying.

Is there such a thing as a test web page somewhere (?Microsoft) which will help identify what app or plugin or whatever is missing? Or what options I need to reset (although I haven't changed any IE options for many, many months now).

 

Have you tried clearing the IE cache ?

 

Hi rsinfo and thanks for input.

Yes, I have. In fact, I clean everything out with CCleaner every time I shut down for the night.

 

What if you run IE without addons ?

 

I hadn't thought of that. I've just tried it, scanning a number of sites. I get no problem there with still images, but it still doesn't like videos. In one case it told me I needed Flash Player 9 or better to run the video, but I know I have the very latest (10.nnn.nnn) on board. Maybe it was disabled by running IE without addons, so I think that's fair enough.

The problem is, the missing videos and images were so random that it's difficult to pin anything down firmly. But I definitely saw some images on two or three sites I visit a lot which I had not deen before.

Now looking through my own blog, I can watch some embedded YouTube videos, but not others which (of course) I have watched in the past.

This is frustrating because I can't provide any firm detail of what works and what doesn't work.

 

For example, if I go to the General Discussions forum on this site, open Steve R Jones' "Must See" post, and follow his link, the videos there all show an empty frame with a tiny box in teh top-left corner with a red X in it - not even the usual "placeholder" icon.

 

Some addon is definately causing problem.

The only sure way to detect it is to disable ALL the addons & then enable them one by one & see where the problem occurs.

 

OK, thanks for that, rsinfo. I'll try this, but I'll be out of town quite a lot over the next few days, so it may take a while. But if/when I get any good results I'll post back here for other users.

 

Hi, g.watson, if this makes you feel any better, I can not even load the page on Steve R Jones post "Must See ". I don't know of any problems that could exist on my machine.

 

Hi Hawk! It would only make me feel better if I were into Schadenfreude

 

Und das auf Deutsch

 

Hawk: You're right; according to Wikipedia, I should have used the lower-case "s" when writing in English! But German's my second language, and the u/c "S" just slipped out.

Arie: Thanks for input. Yes, I'd already got that far, and checked that I had the very latest version installed. I had/have. I also played around with the options in the Flash console on Control Panel (without really understanding totally what all of them do), but nothing seemed to improve.

Following advice from rsinfo, I've disabled one by one the (very few) addons I have installed, but that didn't bring any improvement, either.

 

Thanks, Arie - I'll try that and report back if it solves anything.

 

Done (following all instructions carefully, including re-boot). No improvement.

 

You're right, Arie - I don't! I think I'd rather miss a few pix and videos here and there than totally reinstall Windows. I'll keep tinkering with this and that, and I promise to re-post here if something magically cures the beast, but as of now it's simply a hassle I'm learning to live with, and I'd treat this thread as closed but not resolved.