Pictures not showing up

I tried to run a clean up scan with windows one care safety scanner (free online tool) in my Vista laptop. Some weird images are displayed in place of the "choose" buttons. Attached is the capture below. I know it's something to do with file type association. I use ccleaner regurlarly and i guess this might have screwed up the registry. Can someone help me out?

All other web pages display normally with IE7.

 

This is an online tool? Let us forget the fact that if so you are letting them snoop your computer? I would not do I can do so many other ways too achieve the same thing.

That said unless you have problems viewing your own picture not an issue. You do not pick program that displays jpg,gif or png files within IE. You can not set the wrong association. At best and I am stretching you might of set something in your security settings to not display some images? As I said a stretch as I am not aware of. It is more likely a data transfer issue on your ISP, your server, their server our whatever.

The real question is do those choices with default images function? If so no issue. Someone could of been playing with code on the other end and screwed up the link association.

 

I think its definitely a security setting.

 

It looks like that this page was being set up not to load up pics (gifs, jpegs...) for quick loading. Review your browser option regarding "place holder"?

cheers ...

 

I checked the security setting and the other advanced IE settings. All are set to default. The web page used to display normally before.

 

I'm going to say this again, and as many times as I need to until it starts catching on - people need to stop assuming just because you have a problem, see something unusual, a popup window in Vista show up indicating a process stopping, whatever, that it's something requiring major troubleshooting and research and in many cases disassembly of a system. Unless you abuse your system on a regular basis, surf to know security hazard sites without A/V protection, or are plugged into an outlet with voltage that fluctuates wildly, problems don't happen that often, and what you think is a problem really isn't. This is one of them, and it's a no-brainer. Only one person came even close to figuring out what the problem's cause is (chn) but his setting suggestion was off the mark - image placeholders only deal with images that you're going to download, not normal image display settings. As for the Security suggestions, if it was any other site but Microsoft, possibly, but the fact that it is Microsoft should be a flag for anyone considering that option. If it were a Security setting affecting images, it would affect ALL images on the page in question, not just 3.

The biggest clue that it's not Security related is at the bottom of browser window shown in the snip image - the IE Internet Security "Enable Protected Mode" setting is set to: Internet Protected Mode: Off.

That said -

I've seen this many times before since I've caused it to happen by mistake on more than one website update over 12 years of website design and site management. It is just a site editing and update screwup by the site managers, and not a browser setting problem - but I'll tell you how to figure out what each problem looks like and how to determine the cause.

Clues to the Problem - What to Look For

The key to the problem is the Alternate Text (see my description below) that is shown in the place of where the images should be (Complete Scan, etc.), and the fact the page header graphic (the Windows Live bluebar graphic at the top of the page) is displayed with other images, and only 3 images aren't displayed. Although there's no way to tell from the clip image, I'm sure that the links are active and work properly even if the images aren't displayed.

Site Design and Image Alternate Text

Site designers (myself included) add what's known as "Alternate Text" to the image link/code on the page in case a user's browser can't display the image file on the page for one of several reasons: If the user has image file displaying (called "Show Picture" on IE) turned off; If the link to the image file is bad; Or if the image file is missing. Even though the image isn't there, the link stays tied to the Alternate Text and is still active so the user can still click on the link, and that's really all that counts.

Alternate Text is a holdover from early browser days when not everyone displayed browser images (due to the modem speeds and low amount of RAM back then), but as I stated above, we still use it in case there is a problem with the image file, a link to the image file location on the server, or in case the target browser can't display the image for some reason. URL Links must have something to be connected to on the page, and that's normally an image. If the Alternate Text wasn't there, there would be no link on the page if the image wasn't displayed for some reason.

In those cases, regardless of whether the image is there or not, the Alternate Text tells the user what the image or link is for, since the user wouldn't normally know it was a link unless the user passed the cursor over the image location and saw a URL link come up. Alternate Text is normally used on those images that contain links to other sites or pages, but it can (and usually is) used on most site page images, especially on sites that generate code on the fly, such as news sites or the site this clip is from (Windows Live) where content is constantly being updated by many people.

Browser Setting Problems

It depends on whether or not the images show up in another browser or not (you've indicated they do) or if the image files are actually on the server, which you can check very simply. If you right click on the link where the image is supposed to be, and select "Show Picture", the picture will show if the image is on the server and the Show Picture browser setting is off.

If no picture displays, then you know it's due to a site update, bad link or missing file.

There are 2 IE Internet Options settings that can cause this - but again, if image settings are turned off, it affects all images on the page being viewed, not just 3, and the header graphic is displayed on the page - so it can't be a browser setting affecting all images.

The Browser image file settings in question that should be checked for multiple image load problems are (Tools>Internet Options>Advanced>Multimedia>Show Pictures) or your Java Setting (Tools>Internet Options>Advanced>Java). Most site pages today use Java code that preloads all page images and multimedia content into the browser cache for faster viewing. Again though, both of these settings affect all images on the page and site the user is looking at. If you turn the setting off and reload the page, you'll see what I'm referring to.

Website Design Update - the Most Probable Cause

When it's not a browser setting, it's usually (and most often) caused by a site update screwup. Whoever was responsible for editing the page in question didn't update the all the information when he/she was done. There's 2 things in the editing process that can leave a page looking like this:

1. The new image files were updated and uploaded, but not linked to the page being edited, and the originals were removed from the site image directory, leaving a link to image files no longer there, hence the Alternate Text.

2. Image file links were updated on the page to point to new images, but the new image files themselves weren't uploaded - again, leaving links to files not on the server, and again that's why Alternate text is showing.

Normally on a site as large as the one shown, small problems like this aren't caught unless the same page is updated again or a user notifies the site Webmaster, which doesn't happen often. I can count on my fingers the number of times users have notified me of site image problems on the sites I've managed over the years.

Summary

Whether it's a browser image setting or not, it's not a problem, so don't worry about it, and certainly don't start messing around with your system. I'm sure you've already figured out that the links work fine.