First, there is a difference between how visitors are counted in the state and world Flag Counter.  If we can't determine the exact state, a user is not assigned one.  However, they are still a U.S. visitor, and will register a U.S. flag on your world Flag Counter.

Further, our servers are located in different geographic regions of the United States.  Your state counter will load from Los Angeles while your world flag counter might load Atlanta, Chicago or Dallas.  One might load faster than the other, and your user might not even load your entire page.  A user might quickly press their 'back' button, or stop your page from loading.

A visitor could also delete their cookies for one counter and not the other.

These are just a few things that could be causing this to occur.  There are just too many variables at play here for both counters to represent the same exact count.

You will notice we've added a US and Canada breakdown to the World Flag Counter offering.  This essentially makes the State Flag Counter obsolete, and the World Flag Counter will be the only one receiving future upgrades and enhancements.

That feature is never going to match up properly if your widget was created before that feature was introduced (I think early this week).  The breakdown only counts visitors since that feature was introduced, it does not go back and classify all the visitors you had from the US since your flag counter was active.  So, for instance, I have several thousand US visitors, but only a few hundred visitors in the breakdown.  If you discard your old flagcounter and create a new one, then the top level and the detailed breakdown will probably match up.

Another posible reason for the difference between 2 counters is loading time. Each visit is counted only when the FC image is loaded, so if a visitor comes and leaves after loading one image but before loading the other one, that will break the consistence...
To minimize this, you should put both counters as close to each other as posible. (Still, not completely avoids this problem)

Melinda, sojournersflight

Thank you for your posts, they have helped me both with my site, and to discover an error on the FAQ page which was driving me nuts.(I'll post it separately once I find the right place in this forum...)
Never apologize for being a newbie, you asked new fresh questions that the old timers didn't.
Safe riding...
Bob
"We are all handicapped,
and we are all Gifted;
the only thing we have in common,
is that we are all unique."
- Bob Gorman
http://www.kncell.org
http://KnCell.org/blog