gifs reload on mouseover/out

[standby_md]

Hey, guys!
I'd highly appreciate if you could help me sort out this problem. The site I'm working on has a top horizontal menu, actually very simple with simple javascript rules for rollovers, i.e. the navigation tabs must change their background color and text color on mouseover/mouseout events, which they do. But the problem is in the following. I use transparent gifs to round the corners of the cells that are navigation tabs, but each time I move the mouse over or out any of the tabs the gifs start reloading and make irritating gaps thus making the tabs with normal corners, not rounded. I've checked this on a few different computers with different OS installed, it appeared that on some of them (mostly Windows XP and 98) this is not a problem and reloading takes place unnoticed for a human eye, i.e. very quick, so the corners remain rounded. But on my pc with Windows 2000 installed it's a real pain in the neck. The page looks ugly on every event takes place. Could this be due to some glitches in win 2000 or is this something else that causes this problem? BTW, the project was viewed both in Netscape 6 and IE 6 on all the above mentioned machines.
Please help me, I'm already banning my head against the wall. :(
http://www.myrussian.ru/test/preview.html
P.S. Never mind the cyrillics.

Thank you all
Standby_md

[DCElliott]

Once the gifs are loaded the first time they should be cached. There is no delay on my W2K machine (Pentium 667 /w 128ram on about 1Mbit/sec DSL connection) in IE6. Is this something you see on other websites as well? Look at my website - the first time you hover over one of the menu items at the top you may experience a small delay as the hover image loads, but only for the first time. If it does that every time, then I have to wonder if you have caching turned off on your machine. Just a thought.

DE

[Daybreak_0]

I had a similar problem with a different background and hover. links would flash white before image was loaded.

I inserted the image on the home page with a width and height of 1px and then I think I placed it in a hidden div by negative margining it outside the left hand side. Anyway 1pix did not make much difference, and problem went away as image was loaded as they entered home page.

You can also get some jave to preload images as well