After posting this, myself and MikeO were looking at my RSS.ASPX page in Fiddler.

I was noticing that there are 2 requests for my aspx page, one for the page itself and the other for the stylesheet.

The RSS.ASPX page brings back an RSS feed with 5 items on it.

But Mike was telling me that when he hit the page it was making tonnes of requests and coming back with 84 items.

This flummoxed us both for quite a while until we realised that Mike reads my RSS feed in IE 7.

In IE7, you sign up to a blog feed.

You accept the default values for the feed which look like this;

That is - the default is to keep up to 200 previous posts for the feed.

You view the feed. The view in IE looks like this;

That is - the view says

"I'm going to display All the posts on that feed for you"

The feed grows over time so that you've got links to the last 200 entries referenced from IE's blog store.

You go to view the feed. It builds a view of "All" the posts which means the last 200 posts and all the images required for those posts which might (depending on your browser's caching) mean hitting the source web server quite a lot especially if the source web server has emitted little "tracking" GIF files which try and avoid being cached.

So...two conclusions;

1. When you subscribe to a feed in IE7 it might be worth dropping that 200 down to something more reasonable like 20. I notice that NewsGator FeedDemon also uses 200 but then I don't know that it'll do as much resource requesting as it looks to use the UI to avoid building a single view with all 200 posts in it.
2. IE7 might avoid its default view being to display "All" entries where "All" entries is going to default to "up to 200" and the maximum value you can set is "2500" - that could prove to be a whole lot of generation they have to do.