This is hardly a life-or-death situation, but following a conversation with my nephew, I decided to see for myself by changing my cookie handling setting to "prompt". This is what I found.

Most sites don't use cookies. Quite a few use one or two. Others seem to be trying for some sort of record. When it gets to about 20 I stop accepting them and just block everything from that site. In most cases it doesn't make any difference, and if the site doesn't work properly without millions of cookies, that's their fault for trying to fill my hard drive with the things.

Even coming on here today I had to accept 7 cookies to get on to the site, 4 to log on, then another one for each new page. (Don't worry - I've changed it now so D-A-L cookies are automatically accepted. I just wanted to see.)

Obviously cookies are necessary where a user needs to be identified - forums, shopping and banking sites, and some sites want to be able to recognise repeat visitors, but why use so many cookies? Isn't one enough? One to log in, another for each new page?

I'm not complaining. The answer is in my hands. I just don't understand why some sites bombard visitors with the things. Presumably there is a valid reason for this, but I can't imagine what it could be.

It could be a while before I get back here, so I'll bookmark this thread. I'm not very well nowadays, and the computer hasn't been as well as it might be, mainly rundll32 getting a headache and shutting IE down, plus a bad sector on the C: drive. It seems to have stabilised for now, but it'll soon be time to send it to the great computer user in the sky for a well-earned rest.

I would like to know the answer to this one though.

I can't really say that there is a real answer to the question, because it all depends on the website. What you have to do is figure out what information the cookie is storing on your PC by clicking the More Info button when the prompt comes up in IE.

I've just tried it on the MSN website and I think I had around 20 prompts for cookies. Around 8 of them were related to ads to ensure that next time I visit the site I see a different set of ads or in some cases, see ads that are more relative to me based on my browsing. There was also a cookie saved that stored the language of the site, the colour scheme of the site that I prefer and because you can customise the look of the MSN page by adding more headlines to the news box, adding Hotmail to the page, adding Encarta and local news, there was a cookie for each one of these customisable options.

In the MSNBC news box for example, there is a + and - button (to add or take away another headline) and each time you click the button a new cookie is stored. When you are on 3 headlines and click the minus button, a cookie with the value M:2 is stored. If you click the add button again to take the number of headlines from 2 to 3 the cookie stored has the value M:3.

So as you can see, all of the cookies for the MSN site are relevant if use the features on the website, but if you don't, they are stored anyway with the default values. I'm sure this is similar for a lot of websites and don't forget aswell that when any website has adverts, there is likely to me a cookie (or more than one) stored for each ad. This can usually be stopped by Blocking third party cookies.

Hope this helps