[saffaboy]

I work for a finance company and we have rolled out a new web based application for our dealers to use. However there are a handful of the dealers that are experiencing the application to either freeze or have one of the three frames in the application display 'page cannot be displayed'. This is teribbly frustrating as you can imagine and I have investigated it with the vendor and what are menat to be hard core IT personal at my work but I am getting nowhere.

Both the freezing and in particular the 'Page cannot be displayed' is only happening on Windows XP using Internet Explorer 6 (have not tried IE 7). Not all XP users though are experiencing it. If the users switch to Firefox they are not experiencing the two issues. The problem is that Firefox is not an approved browser with our vendor.

If someone could help I would be so greatful seen this is a major issue!! Any further information required or any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. The main issue we are consintrating on is the 'Page cannot be displayed' seen this is the biggest complaint. About 20 out of 350 dealers are experiencing the problem.

Look forward to any feedback

[Advertisements]

This'll be some sort of compatibility issue with something on the systems of the 20 or so machines that are affected. Compare the setup on one of the ("working") machines with a few of those on the non-working machines, see if there's anything in common, such as Internet Explorer zone settings, firewalls, virus programs, lists of what's in Add/Remove Programs, etc.

Failing all of this, the quickest solution to the problem is to persuade the vendor to approve Firefox for your application - maybe Firefox on its own for the application (set the homepage as the application's startpage for example and turn off the address bar) and Internet Explorer for everything else.

As long as your application doesn't use anything that's Internet Explorer only - that is, if it doesn't use ActiveX, VBScript or anything that Firefox doesn't support - then Firefox will do the job, plus it won't cost the vendor anything extra as the browser is free and doesn't require licenses.

[Neil Jones]

This'll be some sort of compatibility issue with something on the systems of the 20 or so machines that are affected. Compare the setup on one of the ("working") machines with a few of those on the non-working machines, see if there's anything in common, such as Internet Explorer zone settings, firewalls, virus programs, lists of what's in Add/Remove Programs, etc.

Failing all of this, the quickest solution to the problem is to persuade the vendor to approve Firefox for your application - maybe Firefox on its own for the application (set the homepage as the application's startpage for example and turn off the address bar) and Internet Explorer for everything else.

As long as your application doesn't use anything that's Internet Explorer only - that is, if it doesn't use ActiveX, VBScript or anything that Firefox doesn't support - then Firefox will do the job, plus it won't cost the vendor anything extra as the browser is free and doesn't require licenses.

[Johanna]

Neil Jones is an experienced tech, and I'm not trying to oversimplify, but have those 20 comps with the "page cannot be displayed" issue cleared their temp files and rebooted since the new software was installed? Has anyone checked the security permissions on the workstations?

Because IE is such an integral part of Windows, I hate to substitite another browser for issues like this- more problems will occur since the original issues still exist.
Johanna

[saffaboy]

Thank you for your assistance. Just to confirm the application used is an online website dealers log into there is no software that needs to be downloaded. We have got dealers to clear the temp internet files and cookies and reboot but with no success. We have tried various setting changes in regards to the security settings etc.

The only security setting I found to make any difference is the one for displaying secure, non secure data. When this is switched on then the popup message 'Do you want to view secure non secure data' comes up. When this is not selected then the ' Page cannot be displayed' comes up.

[Johanna]

That behavior is by design. I'm not a website expert by any means, just have been learning on the fly for the last couple of years. Are they getting the "page not found" before or after the log in, and is it limited to one frame or are there errors for all? Is there any scripting run on the website once the dealers log in?
Johanna

[saffaboy]

That behavior is by design. I'm not a website expert by any means, just have been learning on the fly for the last couple of years. Are they getting the "page not found" before or after the log in, and is it limited to one frame or are there errors for all? Is there any scripting run on the website once the dealers log in?
Johanna

The issue is only happening once looged into the secure site. We seem to have had a mini break through yesterday. One of the web developers on site (not the vendor) had a look at the source code and saw that the session token is dropping out and instead of picking up the token id the site is being redirected to the following "http://" which explains why we are getting 'the page cannot be displayed'. The secure/non secure popup would be due to the redirected site 'http://' not being secure I would assume. Any thoughts on the above or next steps, we still do not know what the casue is though. All help appreciated.....