Thursday, January 15, 2009

Reason number 4,731 why I'm glad I have a Mac

At the office, we've had a spate of user complaints about a particular application giving an error message that goes something like this:

"Sorry, we were unable to process your request at this time. If you are unable to continue working, please dismiss this warning and then select View, Refresh from your browser's menu."

Someone associated with the product in question produced the following list of "possible solutions":

- Disable Pop-Up blocker
- Clean up spyware (use application such as Spybot and/or AdAware)
- Add [webapp] server to Internet Explorer's Trusted Sites zone (this may be a good idea for any other intranet servers or via an Active Directory policy)
- Clear out Java Cache by running
C:\Program Files\Java\jre1.5.0_0X\bin\javacpl.exe
---Click “Delete Files” then click “OK”.
---*if there are different versions, do this for each version or uninstall older versions and leave only the newest copy.
- Clear out Windows temp folders.
--- C:\Temp
--- C:\Documents and Settings\USER PROFILE\Local Settings\Temp
--- C:\Documents and Settings\USER PROFILE\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files
--- C:\Winnt\Temp
--- *Clear out the Temp/Temp. Internet Files for each user listed in the Documents and Settings folder.
- Reset IE to default settings.
--- Right Click on the Internet Explorer icon on the desktop or go to Control Panel and open Internet Options.
--- Click on the Programs Tab. Then click the Reset Web Settings button. Uncheck “Also reset my home page” then click “OK”.
- Tools > Internet Options > Advanced > Disable "Use HTTP 1.1" (you may need to enable it because sometimes IE just doesn't like the setting. I have actually seen it start working by enabling this option.)
- Tools > Internet Options > Advanced > Disable "Do not save encrypted pages to disk"
- Download the MSXML 4.0 SP2. This link will get you to the download. I selected the msxml.msi.
- Clear Browser Cache
- Delete [product A] or [product B] class file
- If one is currently installed, upgrade to the latest Sun JVM
- Windows Update (also verify that a recent Windows Update has not broken this!)
- Reboot
- Defrag
- Run a tool such as Symantec/Norton WinDoctor


I was going to rant about it, but this list speaks for itself. I'm glad my Mac just works.