Intermittent inability to display Webhelp in IE

[devans]

Hi,

We have been using Flare for some time to produce Webhelp files which we publish on a portal. I have not intentionally made any changes to the publishing process in the last couple of months (and I've been working on the files for a year), however in that time, many users (myself included) have had intermittent problems accessing the Webhelp on the portal in Internet Explorer (which is the default browser for our users). I have just accessed the Webhelp now on my PC with no problems, while another user can't access it at all. It basically just times out and then comes up with the message that it can't display the web page.

The problem is sometimes fixed when you delete cookies, and sometimes fixed when you restore advanced settings, but these don't always work. I've also upgraded to IE9 and probably had fewer problems but it does still happen.

I have read through these forums and have tried a couple of suggestions already:
[*]I have made sure that MOTW is not enabled
[*]I have unchecked the Condense JavaScript Files option.

Neither of these has made any difference.

Other options I have yet to try include:
[*]building a clean project
[*]unchecking the option to Add DOCTYPE declaration

Does anyone know if these would make any difference? Is anyone else having similar problems? Does anyone know how I could fix this problem?!

[Andrew]

Other options I have yet to try include:
[*]building a clean project
[*]unchecking the option to Add DOCTYPE declaration

Does anyone know if these would make any difference? Is anyone else having similar problems? Does anyone know how I could fix this problem?!

I don't know it for a fact, but I doubt either of those options will help. Never hurts to try, though.

If you haven't changed any options in your WebHelp, and this behavior only started recently, then it's likely that something has changed for users, or on the server itself. I don't think WebHelp uses cookies generally, except for favorites.

What's the exact error message it shows?

[devans]

Hi Andrew,

Thanks for your reply. The message is just "Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage" and then there's the button "Diagnose Connection Problems". Not very helpful!

[RamonS]

The question that comes to mind is if there are any connection problems to that web portal? Although often enough error messages state something that doesn't have much to do with the cause it isn't always the case. I'd run Wireshark in the background and capture what is going on. Once you come across the connection problem you can see what the request and response was (there probably isn't one) and then compare to the web server log for the same time.

[Andrew]

You could also try to access any other file on that webserver (if you have to, upload a "dummy" html file). If you get the same problem, the issue is not your WebHelp, but rather your connection to your server.

[devans]

Thanks for your replies. I'll try these suggestions and post back if I am able to work out the problem.

[devans]

I think we have pinpointed the issue as a security problem. That is, I have been renaming the default.htm file as default.aspx and that seems to be where the issue lies. Could also be a conflict with Micronet Silverlight. Thanks.

[RamonS]

Why would you rename a file to .aspx if it does not contain any ActiveServer Pages script? Or did you add some?