> Generally it blinks as the banner ad refreshes and reappears, but the main part of the page doesn't visibly change.

Nuts. Well, this means that the HTML code is being cached somewhere along the line, but the ad banner is being reloaded, because those are set up so that they aren't cached.

If clearing your Temporary Internet Files folder doesn't fix the problem, and you've got "check for newer versions of stored pages" set to something other than "never," then the page cache in question is probably your ISP's rather than your own.

Your ISP may have their own page caching system set up to reduce their own traffic. How it would work would be, you go to RinkWorks and load that page and then, when someone else who uses the same ISP loads RinkWorks, the ISP provides that cached copy instead of a fresh copy. But I've never heard of a whole ISP employing such a thing for the very reason that it causes these sorts of problems. I've only really heard of them being used as part of a corporate firewall or something.

And if the thing is set up properly, refreshing the page should still work. Under Netscape, I'd suggest holding down the shift key when hitting 'reload,' to force it, but I don't think IE does that.

I don't know. This explanation doesn't make a lot of sense to me, but if the same laptop with the same browser with the same browser configuration has the problem with one ISP and not the other, that says to me that the issue has to be with the ISP itself. I can't really think of any dialup settings that would cause a problem like that.