Windows XP SP2, popup blocker, script problems

Poster: dahazeman
Dated: Thursday September 9 2004 - 15:10:25 BST

I had a customer mention that our menu opens very slowly for him and his colleagues. (By slow, I mean it would take 30 seconds or so to show the submenus.) I gave him a list of 8-10 sites, randomly chosen from your list of DHTML menu users. They had no problems with any of those sites.

We're using version 5.42 (licensed). A colleague of mine and I were talking about this, and we thought maybe the XP SP2 update could be the cause (we didn't ask our customer if they had implemented the update or not).

I set up a test machine with a clean install of Windows XP and then updated to SP2 and kept the default SP2 settings. The menu showed up, but wouldn't show the submenus when I hovered the mouse pointer over the menu. I noticed that on the Internet zone "Allow scripting of Internet Explorer Webbrowser control" and "Allow script-initiated windows without size or position constraints" were both defaulted to Disable. I enabled both of them, but it didn't seem to help. I added our site to the trusted sites list, and to the list of sites the new IE popup blocker would allow popups from, and then the menu worked. I then tried disabling the second (above) script setting, and the menu disappeared. Re-enabling that setting didn't bring it back right away. Closing and reopening IE brought it back...sometimes.

It now seems to be random - sometimes the menu shows up, and sometimes it doesn't. When it does, it's usually slow to respond to the mouse pointer hover event. So I think I found the cause of our customer's problems...but I'm not sure how I can go about fixing it, or what I should tell them to change in their browser settings.

http://www.christiedigital.com - if anyone has the default SP2 settings and would like to test the menu for me. I'll continue some tests of my own, but if anyone knows the exact settings I should be changing, or how I can force our site to override the new SP2 security settings (*gasp*) then I'd be willing to try some of them out.

Poster: dahazeman
Dated: Thursday September 9 2004 - 15:52:53 BST

Perhaps I posted slightly too soon...but perhaps not.

I updated our development/test web server's menu to version 5.46. The menu appears every time (so far), even though I haven't added that particular server to the trusted sites list on my test SP2 machine. However, there is still a delay - sometimes the menu doesn't show up at all until 3-5 seconds after the page has finished loading; and most times the submenus are very slow to appear. This is inside our firewall, on the LAN, so it may (if I updated our live server) be even slower to external clients.

Just a quick note - there is only a 100mbit switch between our test web server and my test SP2 machine. I don't know if the delays are being caused by the server or by the client machine itself...I would assume it's a client issue, since the menu uses scripting.

Poster: Andy
Dated: Saturday September 11 2004 - 11:31:49 BST

Hi,

The site looks fine from here running Windows XP SP2.

Do you have any other information from your clients that may help us find a problem?

It's tricky fixing a problem that I can't see so any info may be useful.

Cheers
Andy

Poster: John
Dated: Saturday September 11 2004 - 18:42:11 BST

Looks good here as well - XP Pro/IE6/SP2. Instant response, one menu with a scroll bar - all fine. I made no changes to the SP2 setup.

Nice clean-looking site, BTW.

Poster: dahazeman
Dated: Monday September 13 2004 - 13:57:21 BST

Oops...I should have updated last week. Our customer is actually using Windows 2000 Professional. I haven't got into many details with him. We'll likely be looking at it today. I think it's his company's proxy or some other network issue. I doubt if it's anything on our end, or the menu itself.

Thanks for checking, though, John and Andy.



Thanks...I'd like to take credit for the design, but that would be immoral! I just do the database and techie stuff with it.

~Jason