IE7 wont display certain web pages

[sidewinder]

PLEASE say someone else has come across this.

On some machines, IE7 wont display certain web sites, the most common one reported is Edexcel's.

You just get

Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage.
Most likely causes:

You are not connected to the internet
The website is encountering problems
There might be a typing error in the address

Well, it certainly isnt any of those things, the site works perfectly on most machines.
It isnt just a certain type of machine either (which could of pointed to a bad installation of IE on an image) it seems fairly random

If there is a lot happening on the PC and its running slowly, you'll sometimes even see the Edexcel page rendered for half a second before the error appears. Until I saw this I thought this was a network problem, like the machines couldnt resolve the right IP address, but the fact it is briefly being displayed rules that out

It makes no sense, I cant recreate it because it just seems to happen randomly.
Uninstalling IE7 fixes it, but as soon as you put IE7 back, the problem reoccurs

Getting very annoying now

[Michael]

That's very strange, but I can confirm it does work just fine with IE7.

Do you use a proxy server? If possible try a laptop at school, then take the same one home and see if the problem is still there.

[sidewinder]

Yeah we do use a proxy

lol if I could get it to happen on a laptop I would try that, just desktops so far though!

[Michael]

It looks a fairly simple website, but do you have the latest versions of Flash, Shockwave and Java installed?

[sidewinder]

Not the latest, but fairly recent
I suppose on an affected machine I could reinstall them all with the latest versions and see if it makes any difference

[ArchersIT]

Yeah we do use a proxy

Is it ISA 2000 by any chance? We had some random problems with IE7 and websites which went away when we upraded to ISA 2004.

Jonathan

[davidfew]

We are having similar issues with pages not displaying correctly, we get an Error Code:408 error on random sites.
We have contacted our ISP and they are looking into it.
The net techies in our school reckon its something to do with reverse proxy settings, our reverse proxy is provided by our ISP. I'll let you know of our progress.

[Michael]

Uninstalling IE7 fixes it, but as soon as you put IE7 back, the problem reoccurs

So it works ok with IE6 I presume? What about FF 2.x or 3.x?

[sidewinder]

Nah its ISA 2004, although its then directed to the LEA proxy as well, and the combination of the 2 dont exactly have a trouble free history...

And yes, works with IE6. Havent tried with FF on those machines, because it happens with no real pattern my testing has been limited

[ricki]

Hi

I used to have something reported to me similar by staff and it took me a while to find out the group policy was not always applying the proxy setting. When you went to the machine and the start page would come up from the cache so it appeared to be on the internet.

I had to update the adms on the server and then it just worked.

Good luck

Richard

[robknowles]

Hello,

I had this exact problem last week with Edexcel and several other websites - the way I fixed it was to uninstall the PCE (Policy Central Client), restarted and then reinstalled it. This got it working fine.

Thanks,

Rob

[sidewinder]

I'm not going to get too excited till I try it, but as we use PCE as well I'd say theres a good chance that could be it

Thanks Rob