I'm trying to write a spam prevention tool for use on a mailform displayed in
internet explorer

To do this I intend to display 4 small images containing numbers and letters
and ask the user to type what they read in to a text box for confirmation,
the images will be selected by the server using a PHP script.

What I want to do is embed these images as data in the document using

<OBJECT data="data:image/gif;base64,.....
</OBJECT>

This code will be inserted by the same PHP script

I want to do this so that there is no path back to an image on the server
for a bot to decode a filename from and eventually deduce a link between the
content and the name, also I don't have to create and destroy files on the
fly at the server end.

I want to avoid downloading any kind of active content, making changes to
the users installation, relying on the user to have java or anything I just
want to display some images and not have a path back to the server containing
a fixed name.

I can't seem to get inline data to work for IE though has anyone got a
working example of an inline image definition or something similar that I
could look at ?

No worries I found a workaround

I just hope Microsoft doesn't see it as a security hole and plug it