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I ran into some problems with this user agent and wanted to share what I learned.
It is an add-on for IE7 by DeskShare. It looks at links on a page that a user is visiting to determine if any of them are RSS feeds. This runs in the background once a user is viewing a web page in IE7.
The problem that this add-on presents is that it prefetches all links on the page that the user is visiting. For our site, this was loading the "logout" link for our logged-in users. Therefore, any users with this plugin would be logged-in on one page and then logged-out on the next.
This was a fair nightmare to determine, but I wanted to share this written somewhere appropriate so that others could also find it and know what to do.
In this particular case, the "quick" fix was to no-op any calls to the logout link that had the user Agent as "IEAutoDiscovery". This solution has the disadvantage of other feed readers causing the same thing, but we haven't seen similar behavior from others yet (we'll code-up a more general solution if it gets worse). Other approaches might be to do the logout all in JavaScript, or have the first logout page do a redirect to another logout2 page that would do the actual logging-out (assuming that prefetches only do one level deep).
I hope this helps someone.
Thx,
--Paul.
For reference, the older related post is at:
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