Picture problem
 

For a while I could only save pictures as bmp files.
I talked to someone today with my exact same problem, he doesn't know why he can only save pictures as bmp files either.
This is really getting to me since I can't save gifs... Does anyone have any ideas how to fix it?

Are you saying you see a .gif file on the web, and when you go save it to your harddrive, it ends up being a .bmp?

Yes, but not just gifs, it's the same with every type. The only choice I get is to save it as bmp file for some reason that's beyond me.

Try clearing your temporary internet files.

I just did and I can now save pictures as gifs. Cheers mate.

While I've known about this problem (and its solution) for a while, does anyone know why this happens?

It happens because Windows (and by extension, IE6) doesn't have to actually function properly to outsell all of its competition.

IE downloads the image, displays it (as a bitmap) then saves the origional in the cache. Then when you try to save the image, it goes to the cache, gets the origional, and saves that.
If the cache is corrupt, then in some cases, it looses track of the origional, and thinks the bitmap that it displayed is all there is. In which case that's what it offers to save.
Clearing the cache also empties and recreates all the indexing, etc for the cache which is usually enough to fix the corruption.
--
-billy-

Strangely, I also ran into this problem when using Mozilla 1.6. (I stopped using IE last year.) I've since switched over to Firefox and have yet to encounter this problem, but I was under the impression that this was not browser-specific.

Or maybe I'm just hopeless with technology.