sp2 has made all .shtml files unopenable

[esllou]

ever since I installed, finally, sp2, I haven't been able to open .shtml files on my pc. I first discovered this when trying to open a page I was editing in NoteTab. Usually, pressing F8 opens the page in my browswer. But I just got a white 404-style page.

Then I went into my folders directly to open the relevant page and it wouldn't even attempt to open the file AND every shtml page had a text document icon that you normally get for .txt files.

So I went into folder options and manually changed the "file type" options and even though I choose IE to open shtml docs AND it shows the IE icon in the file type window, the icons remain text documents and won't even open.

help.......

oh, and can someone tell me how to get sp2 OFF my system?

ADDED: ok, now the shtml files are being opened with IE but appearing as text documents! IE isn't doing any of the formatting at all....it is like when you look at a .txt document online. I have the address and status bar, etc, etc, but the main content is just a text document.

[esllou]

progress being made:

now, they continue to open in IE as text documents and then appear as normal formatted web pages ONLY WHEN I PRESS REFRESH!

anyone got an idea about what is happening here?

[encyclo]

Service Pack 2 has stopped the previously-used method of "document sniffing" to determine the MIME type of a document served in IE. In the pre-SP2 days, you could serve up a HTML document as

text/plain

and the browser would notice the HTML markup and serve it as

text/html

anyway. This is almost certainly what is happening here. Document sniffing was damaging for other reasons (related to security) which is why it was disabled in SP2.

Trouble is, I'm still searching for how to define a default MIME type for a particular extension in XP. The only thing I've found so far involves hacking the registry, so I don't think it's that. I'm sure one of the Windows gurus here will know how!

[esllou]

oh, man! My pc is in bits because of sp2...is there any way I can get it back off my system!

My outlook express is really playing up now. Every time I want to change accounts (I have three) using OE, I have to reboot!

Thanks for that reply encyclo...how it sees it as a text doc initially but then as a webpage on refresh is beyond me.

I will wait for a solution to be posted.

added: I hope this isn't affecting how my pages are seen off my host's server! Is there something I need to add to the header of those pages to make them viewable with sp2?

[esllou]

sort of an answer found here:

[phdcc.com...]

wil have to turn off the relevant security settings and hope! What a mess.