Internet Explorer 30-stylesheet limit - Unexplained CSS styles missing: This could be the cause

If you view your website or any other website on Internet Explorer 6, 7+ and you find that some CSS stylesheets seem to be missing (in my case it was a non-functioning drop-down CSS/JQuery menu), then this may be the reason.

I was mystified for a while and tried the usual suspects that are at the root of most IE issues (peek-a-boo, shifted pixels, wierd box-model implementation, proprietary Javascript engine etc). The latest item to add to the list of "usual suspects" is so strange that it is is even amusing. Internet Explorer seems to have a limit of 30 CSS calls before it cuts the rest out. Thinking of it, I always knew that IE 6 had/has a problem with loading multiple CSS files as ti is not very good at multi-threading connections and often renders a jumbled page when some calls timeout.

Remedies
@import: The problem only seems to apply to explicit references to stylesheets (i.e LINK) so referencing some of the stylesheets using @import will bypass the problem.
File aggregation & compression: There are applications that can collect all stylesheets and scripts and aggregate the into a single, or a few files. This is normally done with a performance objective, but it can also solve this problem by only creating one CSS file for IE to load