IE6 chgs to offline while loading page

[Violet]

Running IE 6 SP1. Am connected to internet via cable
modem. Also have a dial-up connection defined for when
I'm traveling. 2-3 times a day when I'm connected via
cable modem I encounter a webpage where IE starts to load
it and suddenly up pops the prompt to dial-up. I cancel
it, go remove the check from "Work Offline" and hit enter
to restart the loading of the webpage. Sometimes it
completes loading at that point and I go on with no
problem. Sometimes there's several iterations of dial-up
pop up, cancel and then the webpage finally loads.
Sometimes I can't get past the dial-up popup at all to
webpage load at all. I'm attempting to load different
webpages all three times; in other words, it's not the
same webpage being loaded each time with differing
results.
Why is IE switching itself to work offline while loading
certain webpages?

 

[H Leboeuf]

Start here.
I.E. starts and stays offline / I.E. offline message when using DSL/Cable
http://www.mvps.org/inetexplorer/answers4.htm#offline_dsl

 

[Violet]

Thanks for your response. I followed your links below
even though that does not accurately describe what's
happening. I did go and follow the instructions in
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;EN-
US;q303346 to edit LoadLCE and LoadSens and set them to
auto. They were set to yes. I also cleared history,
temporary internet files and all but a select number of
cookies. I then rebooted.
I'm researching RSS readers tonight so I went to Google to
generate a list and pulled up entries on forums that I
belong to that made some recommendations. I had probably
8-9 browser windows open, no problems at all with loading
them. Then I clicked to go to an alternate page on one of
the sites and got the "Dial-up Connection" prompt.
Interestingly enough the prompt did not appear until the
page was almost completely done loading. I think that
what's causing the prompt to appear and causing IE to
think that it should work offline is that some sort
of "dialog" or "script" or something else special is being
loaded or run on these pages and that whatever it's
calling for is what triggers the "work offline/dial-up
prompt" sequence.
I want to stress that the problem does not appear when I
first start up IE. It occurs after I've been actively
using it and only on certain pages.
Here's the site I was at: http://www.bloglines.com/
And here's the page that causes the "work offline/dialup
prompt" to appear: http://www.bloglines.com/topblogs
I should add that after I've "X'ed" out of the dial-up
prompt and removed the check from "Work Offline" that I
can continue on using the "topblogs" page and linking to
other pages from it.
I hope this is clear enough for a diagnosis.

 

[Robert Aldwinckle]

it's not the same webpage being loaded each time

with differing results.

I suspect that the symptom is likely to be more closely related
to your DHCP lease which would be independent of the data
but perhaps dependent on time.

Next time this happens before replying to the prompt
and if your OS is NTx open a command window and enter:

ipconfig /all >before.txt

Reply to the prompt. Then enter the next three commands.

ipconfig /all >after.txt
fc before.txt after.txt >diff.txt
notepad diff.txt

Is there anything in diff.txt?


You may be able to do a similar diagnosis on non-NTx systems
using winipcfg. I don't know anything about that command but
from what I understand it is not as complete a display and does
not have any text capture facility. So even if it displays the data
we need you will have to transcribe it and do your own comparing.


BTW this question is slightly off-topic for this newsgroup
and may be answered better in a newsgroup which specializes
in networking for your OS.

 

[Violet]

All emails are included below in reverse chronological
sequence. I did the ipconfig comparisons that you
outlined below. It said there was no difference between
the before and after files. What does that mean?

Your response was sequenced below Henri's as if it were a
response to my first post. Did you read my second post
about the specific sequence of events and the problem
having to do with some sort of "dialog" or "script" or
something else? Last but not least which forum should I
post to and how should I label it so that I don't get the
response that this belongs in the IE forum? BTW, I'm
running Win XP Pro SP1 with all current maintenance
applied.

thanks, violet

 

[Robert Aldwinckle]

All emails are included below in reverse chronological
sequence. I did the ipconfig comparisons that you
outlined below. It said there was no difference between
the before and after files. What does that mean?

I suppose it means that either my guess was wrong
or the problem that I was hypothesising fixed itself
while that prompt was up.

I thought that an ipconfig /all would give you some information
about the DHCP lease that I assume you will be getting.
Can you check that occasionally please? Otherwise we will have to find
some other way of finding that information.

My hypothesis is that if the DHCP lease expires and
IE notices that between the time that it expired and the time
that it was renewed that we would have an explanation for the
symptom. Unfortunately I do not have such a connection
myself so I can not help you with the details of proving that
that is what might be happening.

Your response was sequenced below Henri's as if it were a
response to my first post. Did you read my second post
about the specific sequence of events and the problem
having to do with some sort of "dialog" or "script" or
something else?

I know of no such implementation. I was addressing the point
you made in both subthreads that your problem did not seem to be
related to any particular page or site. If you can get information
about your lease and monitor its expiry times I think that that
would be a simpler explanation. Then perhaps as a workaround
you could avoid any intense network activity around the time
of the expected renewal.

Last but not least which forum should I
post to and how should I label it so that I don't get the
response that this belongs in the IE forum?

Before posting anywhere try a Google Groups search.
For example, try:
"DHCP lease" MVP group:microsoft.*.windowsxp.*

Hmm... have you checked if there are any associated Event
entries (e.g. using Event Viewer, probably the System log)
which correlate with the outages?

BTW, I'm
running Win XP Pro SP1 with all current maintenance
applied.

Good. That's what I'm using too. Ideally though it would be better
to find someone who has the same link type to compare procedures
with.

 

[Violet]

Robert,

If I understand the output from ipconfig correctly the
DHCP lease is good for 24 hours from the time it is
initiated. I logged in this morning at about 7:24.
Here's part of the output from the ipconfig rpt.

Lease Obtained. . . . . . . . . . : Saturday, February 28,
2004 7:25:08 AM

Lease Expires . . . . . . . . . . : Sunday,
February 29, 2004 7:25:08 AM

Immediately after I read your comments, I started up a
browser window and went to a webpage that I know always
flips IE offline even though all the elements of the page
load. I checked event viewer-application and system logs
and there was nothing other than normal startup info
messages.

Since this was within 10 minutes of having obtained the
DHCP lease, I'm not sure how that would have anything to
do with it though I'll gladly admit I am novice-level here
and don't really understand everything we're talking
about. I know enough to navigate around and follow
standard procedures like back it up before you change
anything, etc. Comes from being an old mainframe dba.

Here's the other part that doesn't fit with that. I have
Outlook open all the time and set to automatically check
for mail every 3 minutes. So at the same time I'm getting
the dial-up popup, Outlook can and has downloaded email
simultaneously which tells me that nothing's wrong with
the connection itself.

In fact, I just tried it. I hadn't opened Outlook yet
this morning so I opened, had 39 emails to download.
While they were downloading, I tried to load the webpage,
got the same result and did an "ipconfig all/" which looks
identical to the first one I did this morning.

I should make clear that there are many different webpages
that this symptom can occur on and it always repeats on
those pages, just not all pages. Again, some of those
pages will completely load after one pop-up cancellation,
some after 2 pop-up cancellations, some after 3 pop-up
cancellations and some not at all. But if it's a "1 pop-
up" or a "3 popup", it's always the same for that
particular page. And after the pop-up/cancellation has
occurred on a particular page, I can and have continued to
work and pull up more webpages without incident as long as
I don't return to the one that gave me the dial-up pop-
up. And in the meantime, Outlook just keeps downloading
email which I get a lot of. (I'm a recruiter -
http://www.tebozandt.com )

arggggh

thanks for your help,

Violet

 

[Violet]

Hi Robert,

I read through a number of the Google Group exchanges and
made 2 changes based on answers I found there, one at a
time.

First, Jeff suggested: Check Your LAN settings in
Internet Explorer>Internet options > connections>LAN
settings> Put a check mark in auto detect settings.

Nothing was checked in mine so I put a check mark in auto
detect settings, cleared cached and offline content and
tried to refresh page that usually causes dialup pop-up.
It did so again.

I went back, unchecked that and tried the second
suggestion: In internet explorer -- tools, internet
options, connections tab, make sure
"never dial a connection" is checked.

Mine was set to: "Dial whenever a network connection is
not present." I changed it to Never dial.

Cleared cache and offline content and refreshed page
again. This time it loaded without flipping to dialup
popup. I tried it on a couple of others and it worked
there too.

I've run with it set to: "Dial whenever a network
connection is not present" since Jan 2003 and never had
this problem till the last 2 months. I don't know what
changed that caused that setting to be a problem but I
guess I'll leave it set to "Never dial" and just go in and
manually flip it when I'm on the road and I have to use
dial-up.

Any thoughts on why it might have changed?

ONE QUESTION: Is it significant that the LAN setting
described above is NOT set to "auto-detect"? It didn't
seem to affect my specific problem. SHOULD it be set
to "auto-detect"?

TIA
Violet

Here's the subject: XP Apps Think I'm Offline When I'm Not
Here the date of first post: 2001-12-30 03:05:19 PST

Here's the thread I read: http://groups.google.com/groups?
hl=en&lr=lang_en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-
8&newwindow=1&threadm=e2XkG%23YkBHA.2424%
40tkmsftngp05&rnum=20&prev=/groups%3Fq%3DIE6%2Boffline%2B%
2BMVP%2B%2Bgroup:microsoft.*.windowsxp.*%26hl%3Den%26lr%
3Dlang_en%26ie%3DUTF-8%26oe%3DUTF-8%26newwindow%3D1%26selm%
3De2XkG%2523YkBHA.2424%2540tkmsftngp05%26rnum%3D20

 

[Robert Aldwinckle]

[Original thread is in ie6.browser;
cross-posting to windowsxp.network_web for additional comments]

Immediately after I read your comments, I started up a
browser window and went to a webpage that I know always
flips IE offline even though all the elements of the page
load.

I didn't realize that this problem was so relatively deterministic for you.
I was assuming that it appeared to be a more intermittent thing.

In that case it may be worthwhile doing some tracing with netcap
when you are trying to recreate the symptom.
I use Ethereal to format the resulting .cap files but MS netmon
would be an alternative if you have it (e.g. from Windows NTx server.)

Let's recap so I can check some of my other assumptions:

Violet from Date: Thu, 19 Feb 2004 09:25:09 -0800 (OP)
I must admit that I had overlooked most of that statement.
So you are assuming that the dialer is your backup connection?
(Alternatively it might be a malware dialer.) Have you tested that
assumption at all by letting the dial-up occur instead?
(It would be interesting to check the packets which flow from that alone.)

What is the setting in your Connections tab? For the LAN connection
it should be "Never dial a connection." If instead you are using
"Dial whenever a network connection is not present" (e.g. for convenience
of switching between your direct connection and your dial-up connection)
then perhaps that would explain your symptom and give you a workaround.

I'm not sure of the details but you might instead properly have
"Always dial my default connection" (e.g. if you are using a
PPPoE connection which supports "Dial-on-Demand".)
There should be a link about that option in the link that Henri first
gave you.

Henri from Date: Fri, 20 Feb 2004 08:56:27 -0500 (in first subthread)

Is Work Offline already set before you reply to the prompt?
Depending on how you reply to it you could be setting it then
so of course you would then have to "remove the check..."
to get going again.


Violet from Date: Sat, 21 Feb 2004 18:17:35 -0800 (in first subthread)
Privacy Report (Alt-V,v) shows that there are an unusually high number
of different sites involved in that page. So perhaps that would be a way
of stressing your DNS. (I'm thinking now that perhaps the symptom
is a reflection of some kind of failure in DNS lookup; that would be
similar to the hypothesis about failure during DHCP renewal but still
account for the fact that the link seems to exist. Again, I think that only
a trace is going to tell you for sure what is really going on.)

I'm cross-posting this to a windowsxp NG in hopes that someone
with more knowledge of networking might chip in with their comments.
For their convenience here is the Google Groups link to the entire thread.

<
http://groups.google.com/[email protected]%3E+&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en >


HTH

Robert

 

[Robert Aldwinckle]

Hi Robert,

I read through a number of the Google Group exchanges and
made 2 changes based on answers I found there, one at a
time.

First, Jeff suggested: Check Your LAN settings in
Internet Explorer>Internet options > connections>LAN
settings> Put a check mark in auto detect settings.

Nothing was checked in mine so I put a check mark in auto
detect settings, cleared cached and offline content and
tried to refresh page that usually causes dialup pop-up.
It did so again.

I went back, unchecked that and tried the second
suggestion: In internet explorer -- tools, internet
options, connections tab, make sure
"never dial a connection" is checked.

Mine was set to: "Dial whenever a network connection is
not present." I changed it to Never dial.

Cleared cache and offline content and refreshed page
again. This time it loaded without flipping to dialup
popup. I tried it on a couple of others and it worked
there too.

I've run with it set to: "Dial whenever a network
connection is not present" since Jan 2003 and never had
this problem till the last 2 months. I don't know what
changed that caused that setting to be a problem but I
guess I'll leave it set to "Never dial" and just go in and
manually flip it when I'm on the road and I have to use
dial-up.

XP makes it really easy to do a manual dial. (Ctrl-Esc,T)
Why not use that instead? Then you won't have anything to undo.
Also, if you do forget sometime you'll get the prompt
Work Offline or Try Again? and then really understand
what it means.

Any thoughts on why it might have changed?

With the setting you had I think the symptom may always have been
a possibility, so probably what changed is some new maintenance
which reduced the tolerances enough that you started seeing it.
OTOH can you say for certain that your ISP's network performance
has stayed constant? Things change; things happen.

ONE QUESTION: Is it significant that the LAN setting
described above is NOT set to "auto-detect"? It didn't
seem to affect my specific problem. SHOULD it be set
to "auto-detect"?

With focus on that check box Press F1 to see a more detailed explanation
of what it means. Do you have a proxy? Does it do anything?
The section label is "Automatic configuration" so I think that normally
you wouldn't want either of those boxes checked. As I understand it
that feature is mainly used by corporate administrators who need a way
to configure machines and enforce policy. I suppose an ISP might
be tempted to use it too to try to force its best guess of optimal connection
settings on its clients.


....

Here's the subject: XP Apps Think I'm Offline When I'm Not
Here the date of first post: 2001-12-30 03:05:19 PST

Here's the thread I read: http://groups.google.com/groups?
hl=en&lr=lang_en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-
8&newwindow=1&threadm=e2XkG%23YkBHA.2424%
40tkmsftngp05&rnum=20&prev=/groups%3Fq%3DIE6%2Boffline%2B%
2BMVP%2B%2Bgroup:microsoft.*.windowsxp.*%26hl%3Den%26lr%
3Dlang_en%26ie%3DUTF-8%26oe%3DUTF-8%26newwindow%3D1%26selm%
3De2XkG%2523YkBHA.2424%2540tkmsftngp05%26rnum%3D20

<LOL> the search I gave you had this Boolean expression
author:MSFT OR MVP
to try to filter out the chaff and give you only responses from either
Microsoft personnel or respected posters (MVPs).
In this case the hit was due to MVP but it was spurious. ;o

<quote>
I would't expect any help with this issue - MS-MVP's seem to be under
instruction to ignore it.
</quote>


Here's how the OP finally solved his problem

<
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=...l=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&c2coff=1&scoring=d >

<quote>
If anyone's interested, I got fed up and deleted the LAN connection &
Ethernet card - restored them it looks OK now. Don't know what it was!
</quote>

(Google Groups search for
author:[email protected] offline
) - sorted by date


HTH

Robert
---

 

[violet]

Robert,

Thanks very much for your help and for sticking with me on
this one. Interestingly enough I had a search about a
year ago where one of their preferences was that the
person be an MVP. Desktop Architect position, $130-150k
salary, in charge of strategic level planning for a highly
integrated 25-30000 PC/laptop/desktop environment. I
wasn't entirely sure what an MVP was at that point. But I
learned.

Thanks again.

Violet