On one of my computers, Internet Explorer occasionally "forgets" to load CSS and instead displays the page using just the HTML, which resembles Web pages from 1995 in Spry Mosaic...
If I click CTRL+Refresh, I still get the same ugly page.
However, deleting temporary internet files, then reloading the page, has worked the last few times. That would make me think it is a caching issue, but then why doesn't CTRL+Refresh work? Is there anything else I can do?
I've had a similar issue within Firefox and Google Chrome sometimes. I don't have any evidence, but I've always just contributed it to the HTTP request for the CSS file failing or timing out. A page refresh (F5 or Ctrl+F5) always seems to work.
This happens to me at Twitter more than anything else.
What is your definition of 'occasionally'? Is this occurring > 3 times a day? Does it occur on some websites and not on others? Most importantly, what version of Internet Explorer are you running?
I found the answer: C: Drive was out of disk space.
I realize that's the troubleshooting equivalent of making sure the toaster is plugged in. :) I know I should have checked this, but it's so easy to assume nowadays with 40GB+ hard drives that it's no longer an issue.
Sometimes this kind of problems also occurs due to malware/spywares on your computer. Run a malware check using any of the free utility available & see if it gets fixed. Ad-Aware is one of such programs which helps in removing spywares.
