[Drayon]

After Installing 10.4.11 I have noticed this problem now as well in the exact situation as the OP. Google definitely uses a cookie for these preferences and the cookie is called "PREF".

I previously had Safari 3 beta. At some point in OW i noticed some bugged out text entry field cursor behavior which i have yet to have resolved. iCab was recently announced the other day so i downloaded it an paid for it (its that good). I noticed also iCab had the same bugged out problems with text fields as OW has. The iCab website said this may be due to the Safari 3 beta installed an to update to 10.4.11 which is meant to clean out all the old beta files. I did this and this resolved the issue in iCab tho OW still has some infrequent issues. I noticed however iCab can use "System Cookies" or it own cookie storage. Perhaps ths is part of the problem. But i managed to delete all cookies in every webkit browser and the cookies file in the library folder and im still having the problem in all my webkit browsers OW and iCab but not Safari with Google.

Not sure what exactly is the issue.