Even I can't reproduce consistently, although my main system is particularly affected / infected, another one more intermittent. So most likely for you it will be impossible repro, except for those odd occurences you have already experienced.
Repeated mention of Cookies in this forum has just reminded me of a few related facts that might not be well known. Occasionally MS sites don't send the Cookies that they expect to receive or that they receive and interpret but reject.
Then, for the first case, the only way around this is to change the place where you go to get the Cookies and for the second case delete any stale Cookie that won't be updated (by using just that site) unless you delete it.
What I used to do in XP when this happened in it is do a dir/a/ta/od capture the last few entries from that, then do a dir/a/tw/od and compare if the same set of files showed there. If not it meant that at least one
of the Cookies being sent was significantly older than the rest that had been received and those were probably the cause of my problem. So, then deleting the stale Cookies and retrying typically fixed the problem. Or, as I mentioned,
finding another site which would update a stale Cookie would also work.
If you trust what a Windows Explorer Details view will show you you could use that more conveniently, e.g. sorting by Date Accessed and comparing those timestamps with the ones under Date Modified.
In Vista and W7 this procedure has been complicated by the new Cookies\Low subdirectory. I just checked and in W7 we can now drill down manually into the Cookies\Low folder and supposedly do the same checks on Cookies in it.
It can't hurt to try trusting WE first. Simpler than using my dir commands, especially in Vista and W7 if the Low Cookies are involved. A procedure would be:
- Press Win-E to open shell:cookies
- set View Details (if not already set)
- Sort by Date Accessed (hopefully you don't have to add that column to Details)
- See which Cookies were used by the problem request (e.g. by timestamp under Date Accessed)
- Check each of #4 for currency under Date Modified
- Delete anything in #5 which seems stale
- In Vista or W7 drill down to Low and repeat 2-6
- Retry your request
- Repeat 1-7. (Hopefully #8 worked, if not you would have more information about how Cookies are used by your site when they are not stale.)
Good luck
Robert
---
