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I'm the webmaster for this organization's web site, and there is a cookie-based members login system. It's been working perfectly for all of the other 500 or so members, but one has come up that has everyone over here stumped.
When this one particular individual tries to log on to the site, his browser accepts the cookie, but he's sent to the page that tells him "You need to log in to access the member's area". But, according to IE's privary report, the cookie was accepted. This page only comes up when the server cannot locate the appropriate cookie on the user's machine.
This individual has communicated to me that he has no trouble logging into other sites that use cookies and this is the only time he's ever had trouble with it. Does anyone have any idea what might be going on here? He's using IE 6 on Windows 98 with no firewall and had his antivirus program disabled.
I'd appreciate any suggestions or anything else anyone might have.
Thanks
My site in ASP relies on Session Variables to maintain state after a user logs in with a username/password validated against a database.
The first step occurs without a problem. The welcome screen is shown, the session variables have the proper values so the cookie must be set correctly.
However, when they click Continue, or go to whatever the next screen is, the variables are all undefined and the user is either kicked out to re-authenticate or shown a 404.
At first I thought it could be adjusted in the IE privacy settings, but as Rex indicated above, all is correct in the IE settings. We've even set the privacy to allow all cookies with no better result.
It's not a domain/firewall issue either, since a person can be successful on a different computer in the same area.
I've had this crop up more and more lately, and the only way I was able to get the customer working again was to have them download FireFox.
I can only surmise that something in a Windows Update is causing this error. OR could it possibly be something in setting the cookie from my server? Are there any HTTP_SERVER variables I could examine to see what is going on? Could it be a hidden trojan/spyware on their machine which causes it to delete the cookie?
I'm stumped also. Especially since it works with Firefox on the same machine.
When it was one user it was just an annoyance. With the sixth in two months, something needs to be checked out, and I'm at the end of my knowledge.
I suspect it's something in a Windows Update that is causing the grief.
It's supposed to be 128 bit, but some old IEs were released with lower strengths, for export reasons, and for other reasons, you had to manually install the 128 bit cypher.
That's pushing it, but worth checking out, it's easy to verify with the user, so might as well check that.
Also, standard procedure in these cases is to ask the visitor to flush his/her browser cache (Temporary Internet Files) since IE behaves strangely if the cache or the index.dat for it is corrupt.
If by luck you have a reasonably savvy visitor with the problem, have him/her delete any old cookies for your domain as well.
Jim
I did read about the index.dat file becoming full or corrupted, but I couldn't find one on my machine in the TIE folder, so I didn't want to suggest that one yet.
I did finally do a search and found the index.dat in the several places:
C:/Documents and Settings/<username>/Cookies
C:/Documents and Settings/<username>/UserData
and several in the DefaultUser path as well.
Which to delete? I guess we'll ask Mr. Trial and Mr. Error.
I really hope this helps you.
