This question might belong to SuperUser, but i'll try to ask it here anyway, because i believe, some web developers might encountered this weird behavior.

When testing a site for IE8/winXP compatibility on VirtualBox i run into weird issue of $ is undefined, which is caused by jQuery (and jQuery UI) being not included, when referenced by relative path, which resolves to file:/// url. Seemingly because their size was too big (above 200KB).

Simply replacing links to those 2 big files to http:// ones solved the issue for me.

But here is the question: why did this happen ?

is it a misconfiguration ? a bug ? a known design decision ?

Details:

• VirtualBox 4.1.8
• host os: win7 64bit, guest os: xp sp3 32 bit
• guest additions installed, page was launched from VB shared folder
• the bug was manifesting itself in all browsers (even in opera, which ignores ie security settings, afaik)
• ie configuration is default
• script was included like this: <script type="text/javascript" src="js/libs/jquery/jquery-1.7.2.js">
• exact size limit was not deducted.