I have largely avoided problems with Vista by only running it on PCs on which it comes preinstalled. At least I avoided problems until a few weeks ago. With a total of five PCs and laptops now running Vista in my house, the constant avalanche of automatic updates seems to break something every day. The latest issue I’m fighting is one that causes ASP.NET apps launched in IE 7 from Visual Studio 2008 to sometimes start with JavaScript disabled. It’s pretty hard to teach an ASP.NET class when LinkButtons don’t work.
But worse than having ASP.NET broken on my development box is what IE 7 has done to the PC in the kitchen. For more than 20 years my wife has used my hand-me-down PCs. Last week I bought her her first-ever new PC: a Dell quad-core with 3 GB of RAM, a 500 MB hard disk, a 20-inch LCD monitor, and Vista Home Premium. (For the first time ever, I’m envious of her PC!) At first I was a little hot when Vista didn’t support my trusty USB wireless network adapter, but $70 and a new adapter later, Vista was happy and so was I.
The smiles didn’t last long. My wife fired up IE 7 on her new computer and went to our high school’s parent portal to check my son’s math grade. IE, however, wouldn’t let her get past the login page; it kept insisting “Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage.” She asked if this was another Vista problem. I knowingly assured her it wasn’t, and informed her that she had been running IE 7 on XP for a long time. Just to make sure, I downloaded the latest version of Firefox and went to the parent portal. Much to my surprise, Firefox let me log in and view grades just fine! I spent the next couple of hours toggling settings in IE 7 trying to get past the problem, and a couple of hours after that doing Web searches and analyzing HTTP traffic to find out why IE 7 couldn’t display a page that Firefox had no problem with. (It has something to do with “302 Temporarily Moved” responses coming back over SSL/TLS, but that’s as far as I’ve gotten with it.)
My wife can still check our son’s grades with IE 7 on her old XP PC. She can check grades with Firefox on her new Vista quad-core. But she can’t use IE 7 to check grades on Vista. She’s confused, and so am I.
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This is just a guess but I'm thinking that IE7 is protecting you from sidejacking and not telling you about it. Why your high school is throwing out 302s is odd. You may want to talk to them about it and have them make sure there isn't any malicious code in there.
If there is malicious code then this is what they are doing. They are throwing out bogus 302s to other websites. More than likely popular ones like Live/GMail/Yahoo Mail, eBay, and etc. Using IE7 you aren't vulnerable...just left in the dark. Using Firefox all your cookies for those sites were just stolen and Firefox sent you merrily on your way to your destination. Why they don't close that hole I have no idea.
It probably isn't that, but if you have some script kiddies at the high school who gained access it is very simple to install and all but unnoticable. SSL should protect you but an iFrame, etc. would defeat the SSL challenge.
Could just be an IE7 short-coming as well. Like I said, this was just a guess.
That's an interesting thought. I'm on the road again at the moment, but when I get home later this week I'll spy on network traffic in Firefox and learn more about what's going on. If there's sidejacking going on, I'll see it.
SideJack,
-- 302s are common and hardly odd. Whenever a developer uses Response.Redirect (which they do often) the server sends a 302 w/ the destination url in the location header.
Sounds like nbc.com its worked in the past but this Saturday ie7 tells me it can't display the page, I thought they were just down. Until i tried today and received the same message. Then I loaded it in Firefox with out issue. Weird.
Jeff - if the logs look fine maybe try the IE8 beta. If this turns out to be a bug a case can be opened with Microsoft before the next IE8 release.
You are right Chris. I was just throwing it out there. I was thinking maliciously. ;-} It sounded like the 302 responses were the problem, so I figured they were for outside domains. If IE7 on Vista chokes on all redirects then it wouldn't be usable and CNet will have a field day! I won't have a machine with Vista/IE7 handy to surf with until I get to work Monday or I would create some quick test pages now to see if I could duplicate it.
I keep Firefox installed in addition to IE just for these cases.
Sidejack, why install IE8 beta if Firefox solves the problem?
I am curious about the whole “driver thing” with Vista. All my computers run Vista (seven around this house – but one of them runs Server 2008), and all my hardware works – even the hardware that did not have “Vista Drivers”, such as an ancient scanner (Parallel port connected Umax Astro-something) and two different Logitech web cams (and older “notebook” model and an older desktop model). In all three cases there were (a) no Vista drivers from Microsoft, (b) no vista drivers from the manufacturer, and (c) initially question marks in device manager.
In all three cases, simply using the XP drivers works perfectly. Go to device manager, properties, driver, update driver – you know the drill. [Don’t run “setup.exe” from the manufacturers XP driver install disk, in other words].
What I am curious about is your USB wireless adapter. Are you sure that the XP NDIS v5 driver would not have worked in Vista? Did you try to use it by saying “Have disk”, etc., navigating to the INI file of the XP driver disk from the manufacturer? On one of my boxes, I was using an XP driver (NDIS v5) from Realtek for a few months until a native Vista driver came out.
The only device I had that this did not “work” with was a video card – Vista actually had Microsoft “generic drivers” that worked (including Aero in my case), but performance was not “good enough” given the quality of the card. So I did buy a new video card in two machines.
I believe there will be a performance hit when using older driver models with newer OS’s. For web-cams and scanners, this is not a concern. Video certainly is (especially Vista). For network adapters… well, I would say that normally it would be a concern but you mentioned “wireless”, so my guess is that it is a wireless G adapter – the performance hit using an NDIS 5 driver would not be noticeable since you are limited to “G” speeds, anyway.
I’m no expert (I learn by reading your books, after all!) Like I said, I am curious about the whole “Vista sucks – my hardware won’t work” rants on the net. This has not been the case for me, and I think there is a lot of misunderstanding around this issue.
Does your old USB wireless adapter, in fact, work with Vista after all?
It's a long story, but I tried everything. Vista ultimately popped a dialog that said (paraphrasing) "Ths product doesn't work with Vista and the manufacturer has indicated to Microsoft that it never will." It was a NetGear WG111 adapter. WG111v2 works with Vista if you download updated drivers, but WG111 apparently does not.
I've got the same issue with nbc.com that's what brought me to you. Firefox lets me browse just fine...Ie7 not so much...crazy.