Netscape's memory cache: mysteries remain

Following up on the item posted last time regarding editing Netscape's memory cache size: Several questions and oddities remain:

Reader Ken reports that he added the memory cache size line to the Netscape Preferences file. However, after launching Netscape, he then reopened the Preferences file and found that the added line had vanished! I tried this myself and confirmed it. However, it did not happen to Gary Gorka.

Using Communicator 4.5, Rob Henerey found that pages would load from his disk cache rather than from the Web, even if a newer version was available on the Web and he had the "Compare...Every time" option checked. So he tried setting the disk cache to zero and upped Communicator's Preferred Size to 24MB. The problem remained! Even so, a "reverse" sort of issue also occurred: When clicking the Back button, Communicator went to the Internet to load the revisited page rather than retrieve the page from any supposed memory cache. Rob contacted Netscape's Simon Fraser about this and Simon replied that the problem should be fixed by the next release.

Possibly related to Rob's problem: a reader sent me the following quote from a newsgroup posting : "When using Netscape 4.05 on a Mac running OS 8.1, pages taken from the network will load into the disk cache, but not the memory cache. As a result, all pages are loaded from the disk cache (or the network), rather than the faster memory cache retrieval. After loading a page and then typing 'about:memory-cache' into the URL, the page reads: 'There are no objects in the memory cache.' I have increased the memory allocation to 20MB, the disk cache to 5MB, and virtual memory is on."

Despite all of this, readers continue to report that increasing the memory cache size (by either method described previously) results in Netscape working "faster" and "zippier."