Webmaster Forum / Browsers / Internet Explorer / June 2005

I have a really strange issue here.  As a fairly seasoned computer
geek, this throws me into so many loops I'm getting sick.  I hope to
god someone has seen this.

My company uses a java based application for a big part of it's
operations.  One of the functions the users have is to view case
results for a search and it does this by building a file into the
c:\temp directory and then opens the file with internet explorer
specifically by calling iexplore.exe as the parent program.  This
normally works fine.

This is the problem I have:  Some machines have a problem with this
functionality, and I went through every step I could with regards to
the java installation as I thought it was a java based issue.  Turns
out it has nothing to do with java.  Because of this I'm going to leave
java out of my speak from here on out.

Problem at hand:
Some machines seem to not be able to parse the html inside the file.
When it opens, it opens the file but all I do is see the internal
structure of the document including all of the html tags.  The filename
has an unknown extension.  It is called viewfile.8859-1

I assumed it was a problem with the html formatting inside the
document.  I opened it with a txt editor and it does indeed look
different there than what I see with the pseudo-parsed view that
iexplore.exe gives when it opens.  The notepad view shows hidden
carriage returns, etc and visual formatting is all screwed.  The
internet explorer view of it shows a pretty structured layout of the
html tags.  Due to this I figured the formatting is all corrupt and
that would be the cause.  As a test, I decided to rename the file and
give it a known extension of (.htm).  I then try to open the file.  It
works fine!

It gets worse.  I reverted the file back to it's original state to
continue further testing.

The next test I stumbled upon accidentally as I was wanting to try and
view a copy of the file that was generated from a working machine.  I
remotely connected to the hidden share of a machine (\\machine\c$\temp)
and opened the file remotely, it worked totally fine!  I figured it was
a good file.  I copied the file local to my machine and opened it
again.  Guess what.  It no longer worked!!  I then tested by copying my
"original" file from my local machine up to a network drive and tried
to open that.  It worked fine!!

I don't get it.  If I move this file to any network location, I can
open it with internet explorer without fail.  As soon as it gets put on
the local machine, it stops working.  It's the same file.. contents are
the same.  Nothing is changing the file during transmission as I test
it by copying the one file up and down several times, testing in each
location each time.

Finally, the last test I try is to open the unknown file extension with
iexplore.exe again, but this time I remembered the file association to
iexplore.exe so I can just double click it in the future.  this just
causes more strange behavior.  On the local copy of the file, when I
double click on it, my window just flashes slightly and nothing ever
opens.  When I double click on the network copy, it works totally fine,
yet again.

I'm at a loss here.  How can this file be opened from the network, but
not from the local machine with iexplore.exe??  This makes no logical
sense.