In one of our recent projects, we had an interesting case: the whole application was built around an interactive map for a fairly large shopping mall, and the main goal of the system was to plot the closest route to a user-selected destination.
When we use css-sprites it's important to make browser cache them for longest period possible. On other hand, we need to refresh them when they are updated. This is especially visible when all icons are stored in single sprite. When it's outdated - entire site becomes ugly.