title: substr() with negative value not working in IE
body: <p>EDIT:I've changed the title, because the issue had nothing to do with IE image.load() firing - my substr() wasn't working (see accepted answer).</p>
  
  <hr>
  
  <p>There's a ton of posts about making sure that you define your onload handler prior to assigning img.src in order to guarantee that the onload handler is in place in case the image is loaded from cache first.</p>
  
  <p>This does not appear to the be issue in my code, since that's precisely what I have done.</p>
  
  <p>Note that this script works across all other browsers, but IE 8 and lower does not trigger the onload inline function.</p>
  
  <pre><code>var i = lastSlideIndex || 1;
  
  while(imagesQueued &lt; MAX_IMAGES){
      var preloadImage = new Image();
      preloadImage.arrayIndex = i;
      preloadImage.onload = function(eventObj){
          debug('Image ' + this.src + ' loaded.');
          slideshowImages[this.arrayIndex] = this;
          if (this.arrayIndex &gt; lastImageIndex) lastImageIndex = this.arrayIndex;
          triggerSlideshow(this.arrayIndex);
      }
  
      // add leading zeros
      var leadingZeros = "0000000".substr(-(String(MAX_IMAGES).length));
      imageNumber = leadingZeros.substr(String(i).length) + i;
  
      debug('preloading Image #' + imageNumber);
      preloadImage.src = fullImagePrefix + imageNumber + "." + IMAGES_TLA;
  
      if (++i &gt; MAX_IMAGES) i = 1;
      imagesQueued++;
  }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Any other suggestions would be deeply appreciated!</p>