MSXML 5.0 install requested by bbc.co.uk

[woody]

We have been having a problem for a while now where pupils are trying to access the bbc homepage and IE 7 is crashing.

 

What is happening is that the BBC website for some reason is requesting that MSXML 5.0 be installed. This of course is restricted but it is causing the browser to crash.

 

We have tried to install MSXML as administrator which works, but it is still wanting to install for each individual user.

 

Any ideas?

[mac_shinobi]

if you go to where it installed MSXML 5 or whatever it is its requesting, am presuming it goes into the c:\program files folder somewhere.

 

If so give authenticated users modify persmissions on the root of the directory or something along the lines of permissions.

 

Not sure if when they are logged on though that it would see the c: drive ?

 

Just a thought.

[psydii]

Possibly a similar issue to this one?

http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A2=ind0711&L=windows-uk&T=0&F=&S=&P=2896

 

Folks,

 

For anyone else having much fun with this:

 

The good news is I found a fix for this since we had about 3,000 pcs having issues (drawback of having 2 common pc images - 1 for staff and 1 for student pcs!) after spending 13hrs on this yesterday.

 

After much following of blind alleys and cul de sacs etc I found that if you went to the BBC site as an admin, it'll crash the first time as expected but if I then re-visited it it worked fine and hence its why the realplayer fix appeared to work but in reality its not this that fixed it for me. I concluded that something was happening in that first crash which resolved it for the subsequent runs. This allowed me to take a snapshot of this process using win-install and thus I found:

 

The BBC site is forcing realplayer to re-register a whole load of HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT registry keys which in a locked down environment will cause an IE crash with an error code of 0xc000005 (access is denied). The keys I found either relate to the JRE's installed or Realplayer. As soon as I applied the registry file with just classes_root keys to a problem pc it resolved the issue and allowed normal operation of the bbc site once more incl. radio player etc. It is realplayer version dependant though so I have a version for 10.0 and for 10.5.

 

I deployed my fix via our Win-install scheduler service to our entire system and it seems to be working (fingers crossed, touch wood etc ;-) ).

 

I can post my registry file to anyone who wants it but you will have to modify it for your environment most probably.

 

Thanks to all who replied to my post,

 

Martin Searle

PC Desktop System Administrator

Computing Service

University of Kent

[mac_shinobi]

yeah the reg file would be handy

[psydii]

I'm not Martin, I'm just quoting him from elsewhere...

[woody]

Thanks for replies guys. I don't think it is quite the same as what Martin looked at psydii.

 

I have had some success in that I have downloaded MSXML 6.0 from the MS website and installed it onto a PC with this problem, and it seemed to stop the BBC website asking for MSXML 5 when a pupils goes to the homepage.

 

So just need to deploy MSXML 6.0 now and hopefully that will be the end of it