Apache on Windows, htpasswd, login every page

Login prompt for every page - ugh!

[jenifer]

Hi all,
I'm having a problem with htaccess/htpasswd with Apache on Windows. I have had two clients, with two different web hosts both with Apache on Windows servers, come to me with this same problem and I can't figure out what the issue is... two scenerios as follows:

The first client has one directory password protected with only one html page and a handful of word docs in it. The client types in the url to the main html page in the directory (actually the only html page in the directory). The password box pops up and they type in the correct info. They then see the html page with all of the links to the Word docs that they can download. All of these links are just href="this.doc" and such. When they click any link, they get the password box again. If they click another link they get the password box yet again. This happens for every link they click (not just the usual 2 times).

For the other client, the have a bunch of php pages in a single directory. All links were similar to the above scenerio where there was no directory info in the links or posted forms. Every new page pops up the password box. Even form posts from one page to another causes the password box to pop up.

The catch is, this doesn't happen for me (the proverbial programmer's "works find on my machine" thing). I was googling for quite a while late last night and can't figure out what might be causing this. The htaccess and htpasswd files look fine and don't have anything strange in them.

I even moved these files to my other web host which is Linux - I just changed the path name to the htpasswd file in the htaccess file to work on that server and it works fine. Client can access the pages without the numerous password prompts. It just doesn't work right on the Windows/Apache servers.

I have no ideas. Any thoughts? Has anyone else run into this at all?

Jenifer