- Posted by miketeye on May 26, 2007
Share on FacebookI did an earlier post today in which I explained the solution which worked for me, when an SBS 2003 server I maintained started throwing 404 errors when a user tried to access Outlook Web Access (OWA). You may read that article from here:
SBS Outlook Web Access (OWA) 404 Error
However, I did experience a similar but unrelated problem from the client side of things and did not find any answers on the web so I thout it wise to document my solution to that problem here.
Well, what is the problem? I have been using my home computer to connect to Remote Web Workplace for a few years. About a week ago, Internet Explorer gets to the home page of the server remotely but is unable to load the login page to the RWW home page. The funny part of the situation was that firefox did present the login page to RWW and did present the home page of RWW but also will not load the necessary ActiveX controls to enable connection to a machine on the remote network. Firefox does prompt for the ActiveX, but is unable to install it (It complains that security settings could be the cause). I tried to use my laptop with same IE7 and it did work perfectly well. RWW allowed me access to my office computer. That assured me the problem was not from the server side, but the client. Also, the fact that it worked with IE7 on my laptop meant it was a problem local to my home PC, which is a good start.
Now that we know the symptons of the problem, what are the causes. Very blurred, but I will try to GUESS and say I very much suspect my uninstallation of One Care beta might have upset some IE7 settings. I will not put my money on it, but that was the last thing I remeber doing b/4 the problem surfaced.
Well, how about the solution then?, I did not find any meaningful leads from google, and since I don't always like to use the laptop, especially when I need to sit in an office like posture, I started an attempt to solve the problem. I tried Internet Options and changed settings over and over without joy.
So next, I decided to try running repair on the installation, so I went to control panel, Add/Remove programs/Windows Internet Explorer. To my surprise, there was no repair option, just unistall (one would expect better from Microsoft). So without an option to repair, I grabbed a copy of the downloaded IE7 install and run it. It never gave me the choice to do a repair (which is standard install behaviour) but rather went on to display a long progress bar.
Happy to say at the end of that display of progress bar from IE7 install program, I launched IE7 again and my Remote Web Workplace (RWW) was working once again.
Cheers!