DHTML issue w/ third-party KB solution

[Guest]

Environment: Windows XP Professional SP2 workstations in Windows 2000 domain.
Desktops are standardized on IE6 with all latest patches and updates (OS and
browser). We're currently in the testing phase of a third-party Knowledge
Base deployment.

Issue: Two of the workstations involved in testing experience an issue when
trying to post a new document to the KB. When a user creates a new document,
the KB software, which is entirely web-based, present a rich text editor
embedded in a web page using DHTML. The editor provides all the familiar
formatting controls via a row of buttons across the top of the page (text
styles and formatting). On two of the test workstations the buttons simply
aren't functional. There is no error or any other sort of notification, the
buttons simply don't work. Other workstations involved in the testing
experience no problems whatsoever, everything works fine.

A call to the vendor's tech support revealed that they'd seen this issue
once before, and that customer solved the issue by rebuilding the workstation
from an image taken from a workstation that didn't experience the issue.

We're not particularly interested in rebuilding workstations if it can be
avoided, it would be far better if we could track down the root cause of the
issue and fix it.

Thank you in advance and I appreciate any and all help on this one that I
can get.

 

[Robert Aldwinckle]

....

Environment: Windows XP Professional SP2 workstations in Windows 2000 domain.
Desktops are standardized on IE6 with all latest patches and updates (OS and
browser). We're currently in the testing phase of a third-party Knowledge
Base deployment.

Issue: Two of the workstations involved in testing experience an issue when
trying to post a new document to the KB. When a user creates a new document,
the KB software, which is entirely web-based, present a rich text editor
embedded in a web page using DHTML. The editor provides all the familiar
formatting controls via a row of buttons across the top of the page (text
styles and formatting). On two of the test workstations the buttons simply
aren't functional.

If they are implementing using scripting, broken or disabled scripting
would explain the symptom. To test the idea you could use a script debugger
and compare the behaviour of scripts for the two cases. It might even be
sufficient just to set Active Scripting to Prompt and reply Yes to all prompts
for it. Etc.


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