Floating Menus: I have a problem, can you help me figure it out?

[steveneven]

I have 2 sites, one is mainly just for testing, unfortunately its the live site that has the problem .. grrr.

Ok in the forums on the respective sites there are menus that appear when you run the mouse over them, these menu's are ONLY in the forums.

Under Firefox/Opera/Mozilla/Epiphany (what ever its called) these menu's work fine.

In IE the menus do not pop up.

I have IE 6, on winXP with Service Pack 2. (each of the users that have mentioned the problem are in the same boat here - so one test I have not had the opportunity to try is does this effect SP1 users or users of earlier IE versions?)

I think the problem relates to the way that IE deals with .png images, BUT I am not sure, as the exact same forum is used at my test site and the menu's work fine at this site.

The site admin at the failing site emailed me to let me know that the menu's do work if you use an anonymizer style service. Which is even more confusing.
Service:
http://www.the-cloak.com/login.html

I don't mind chopping and changing code, but I don't know what to change as the problem only seems to effect IE users visting one site.

One more point is that IE users make up just under 50% of traffic, its enough for me to want to figure it out, but not enough for me to rip everything out and start again.

I wonder if another pair of eyes might figure this out.

A link to my test site (a working -test- forum):
http://www.dickinsd.f2s.com/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=1&forum=1

And a link to a thread on the site that has the problem:
http://www.linuxjourney.com/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=145&forum=4

To test:
Open the link, hover your mouse above the name of each poster, on the working site a menu will pop up which offers you a link to the users profile.

Any suggestions:

Thanks

Steveneven

[steveneven]

An update; there has been a post from an unregistered visitor that has informed me that the site DOES work on a Windows XP install with IE6 and NO Service Packs.

I am now a little more confused, does SP2 have an issue with the site, or does the site dislike SP2?

Steveneven

[steveneven]

OK Another UPDATE...

I decided to call a friend that runs Windows 2k and ask if he could test the site, he could test, and EVERYTHING worked fine...

SO I asked him to look at the site with his XP machine(with SP2) so I could show him what the prob was and guess what - it WORKED???

SO Now I am confused...

Ok so only one person complained about the problem (as far as I know) but as I also had the problem I took it to be a problem with XP+SP2.

The problem is obviously not with my site as I guess most people that look at the site either don't notice that something is not working, OR it works fine for them.

I guess I am in the minority of effected users.

Luckily I mainly use Fedora Core and Firefox is my browser of choice, and the site is aimed at Linux users, so I think I will spend no more time on this problem.

Thankyou

Steveneven

PS: the odd thing is, comparing our version information from the Help>About Internet Explorer, we both appear to have the same versions of IE with the same updates, yet one machine works and the other doesn't...

[DanceInstructor]

I looked with xp sp2 ie 6.0. Works fine....

[autocrat]

Seems fine to me!
Just a note, but it's stuffed in NN6 for win..... broswer doesn't seem to support fancy css menu's!

[DaveSW]

Same spec as Dance Instructor, but I noticed the page took some time to load even on broadband, and it didn't work till the page was fully loaded. Even then it was slightly out of line. But it was usable.

[steveneven]

Thanks for looking people.

It was doing my head in, but I think on the whole I must be in the minority of users experiencing a problem.

Not usre what I can do about site speed, I am pretty sure its my hosts DB server, I have a different site accessing the same DB server and it seems pretty slow FAR too slow.

On the whole the performance at www.linuxjourney.com does not seem to be too much of a problem (unless you guys think other wise?) I only notice speed issues every now and then, but then I have probably got most of the site cached locally, so I don't know.

Thanks for tips and for looking anyway.

Steveneven (Dave)