Hi folks,

We are having an odd problem with IE6 in relation to downloading
Office-related files (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc) from web pages on my
company's Intranet. I've seen hints of this problem in other posts but no
solution to it....

Our Intranet provides a simple login mechanism in order to control which
webpages and files a user can view/download. Once successfully logged on,
the user's web session is persisted and contains appropriate authentication
data to allow the web server to handle HTTP requests appropriately. So far,
so good...

The problem we're having is that when the user successfully arrives at a
page they have access to, it will contain a hyperlink to a file (which is
also held on our web server). - on clicking the link, IE6 sends the request
to the web server but presents a completely different session to the WS. As
a result, authentication fails and the WS returns a message to the user to
say they are not authorised to download the file.

As I said, the problem only seems to afflict Office-related files. Other
filetypes (such as .txt, .pdf, .zip, etc) work absolutely fine - IE6 provide
correct session data to the WS.

However - and this is where things become very strange indeed! - if the
user right-clicks the hyperlink and selects the "Open in New Window"
optkion, IE6 then sends the correct session to the web server and the Office
file is delivered back to the user as expected. (This also works if the
hyperlink has a "target" attribute which forces the file to be loaded into a
different window).

Does any of this sound familiar to anyone? And is there a fix for it?

Many thanks in advance!

--

Cheers,

Dave Matthews

'New Avengers' and 'Professionals' sites at:
http://www.mark-1.co.uk