Why are My Cookies Being Deleted in IE8?

Ever since I upgraded from IE7 to IE8 (first to the beta, then to the released version), I’ve seen that my cookies seem to disappear from time to time.  This is evidenced by the fact that I need to log in again to such innocuous sites as my.yahoo.com.  I’ve finally figured out that this seems to be happening every time I reboot my machine (or it decides to crash upon waking up from hibernation – this happens all the time.  ARGH.)  Sometimes it takes a while to see patterns in these things.  Or I just ignore it until it bugs me enough to do something about it.

In searching for a solution, I’ve seen that a lot of folks are having problems with IE8 and CCleaner with respect to cookies, but I’m not running CCleaner.  Some other posts led me to look at the Delete Browsing History screen below.  You can get to this either from Tools / Internet Options / Browsing History / Delete or from Safety / Delete Browsing History…

imageAs I understand it, having Preserve Favorites website data checked means that content belonging to sites in your Favorites will preserve their cookies and temporary Internet files.  But I rarely use Favorites (sort of a perverse laziness).  Now I really like cookies.  I don’t really worry too much about my privacy at this level and I don’t *want* to have to retype my usernames and set other settings all the time.

Unfortunately this screen is an *active* delete of browsing history, so I don’t think that changing anything will have an effect.  I’m not the only one complaining about this out on the ‘Net, so hopefully there’s a solution out there somewhere.  Let me know if you find it!

I’ve posted this question to the MSDN Internet Explorer Web Development Forum but so far, no responses.

Similar Posts

17 Comments

  1. I’m on Win7, and I’ve applied all my updates, and this is CONSTANTLY happening. I lose yahoo, facebook, and other sites regularly. I’m going to try the trick of entering them into their own security mode, but damn, that’s annoying. IE8 should be sane and not delete cookies that aren’t expired.

  2. In-private browsing settings is probably the problem with IE8, you can “choose” to keep cookies for websites that are in your “favorites” folder.

  3. hi,

    I encountered similar problem but even if i did as wat Patricia suggest, it simply doesn’t work on mine be it IE 7 or or IE 8. That cookie simply is missing that does not allow me to access to my school material. School helpdesk directed me to here, hoping i can find some tips after trying to solve my problem, but to no avail. Do anyone has any more tips? I’m desprate for help as i’m an doing and distance degree, which can only depends on emailing school helpdesk for help. No matter what i did on the advice from the school, my problem is still unsolve.

  4. Happened to me once two days ago. Before that … I had weeks of problem free use. Before that … several times per day.

    This is the craziest, and most frustrating problem. When I see yahoo time out, I know instantly that I have to go to google and re-enter my search settings. I know that I have to log back into a half dozen other sites, which would otherwise still be logged in.

    In the blink of an eye, IE wipes out all cookies! One thing that I *think* is a common clue is that it seems to happen when I close an IE window. Not a tab, but a seperate window.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.