Need help with htaccess IE6 issue

htaccess IE6 issue

[Hikemaster]

As the title suggests I'm an idiot as far as apache goes and I'm here to beg for help. I'm on a shared hosting plan. I've set up password protection on one of my directories and it works beautifully for IE7 and Firefox. But when an IE6 user visits any page on my site, they get the Restricted Area username/password box as if they are trying to access my protected directory! They can just cancel out of it and browse the site, but when they click on a link to go to another page, the box pops up again.

Here's my htaccess file inside the protected directory:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine off
</IfModule>
AuthUserFile "/path/to/htpasswd"
AuthGroupFile /dev/null
AuthName "Restricted Area"
AuthType Basic
require valid-user

The corresponding errors that pop up in the error log when the IE6 user visits the home page are:

File does not exist: /home/myname/public_html/401.shtml
File does not exist: /home/myname/public_html/{thumb}

Can anyone tell me how to get rid of this issue?

Thanks very much.

[gergoe]

If you have a single reference to that protected directory, the login window pops up. It can be a single image, a broken image (and your ErrorDocument is changed to a file in that directory, see below), a css file, and virtually anything. You would need to check your access log for the whole bunch of log entries which are initiated when you load one of the pages (you can -virtually- group them by your ip address (1st field) and the time of request (4th field)), and see which page gets a 401 response (6th field), when you cancel the login prompt, instead of the normal ones (2xx or 3xx).

The error log entries you mentioned might have some relevance if you happen to have an ErrorDocument directive somewhere in your htaccess file (or you defined something related to error documents in your host's configuration tool - if that applies), and that is pointing to the protected directory, otherwise I'm afraid they are not relevant.

[Hikemaster]

That makes sense and gives me a good idea of what to look for. Thank you very much.