IE6 Cannot Accept Cookies

[Jerry Wong]

Heya all,

Had this problem starting this morning. I was suddenly
logged out of every single site that I was registered to -
the cookies got wiped. No big deal, normally, but when I
went back to log-in to all my sites, they wouldn't work.

After a few painful minutes to searching, I discovered
that none of the cookies from the sites were saving. I
checked all my cookie settings, IE security settings, and
pretty much every setting that exists in IE6.

Anybody know of any circumstances in IE where the browser
will suddenly stop accepting cookies? And of interest to
note is that ASP-run sites have no problems saving cookies
to my computer, but only PHP-powered sites experience the
problem.

And btw, the problem does not exist in Mozilla, so I'm
thinking this is a problem on my end involving IE.

Thanks,

 

[Guest]

run spybot

 

[Jerry Wong]

Ran SpyBot. Still no good. It found a few pieces of
things, but most were ad-related cookies. There was one
entry regarding a DSO exploit for IE, but after fixing all
of it, the cookie problem still persists.

I spent a few hours poking around with the problem last
night, and here's a quick rundown:

- IE6 does not save cookies from SOME sites. Most (~80%)
sites are still able to store cookies, but about 20%
cannot.
- I ran a packet sniffer on IE6. For those sites that do
not work, the cookies are arriving correctly. It's as if
IE is simply discarding this cookie data.
- The problem seems to also involve permanent cookies. On
some of the sites that do NOT work, I've found that
session cookies still work (the "do not remember me"
login). So, some sites work completely fine, others are
only able to store session cookies, while the remaining
can't store either session or perm. cookies.
- I have no sites in IE's "do not accept cookies from"
list. But somehow IE is choosing to discard the cookies
from these sites anyways.
- It appears to be domain-based. I whipped up a quick PHP
script that saves a permanent cookie and ran it locally
(on my machine), and on 2 remote hosts. The local and one
of the remote ones work, but the remaining remote host
doesn't. It's the exact same code, so the only reasonable
explanation is that IE is somehow rejecting perm. cookies
from that domain.

Hope somebody out there knows what the problem is