Ted Fitch

IE 7 "Wildcard" bug in Vista and XP - hot fix now available!

Ted Fitch — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 19:15:00 GMT

Some of you may have noticed that in IE 7 for Vista or XP you can't use a wildcard (*) to designate a server address in one zone in IE and then designate another address on that same server in another zone.

For example:

If you add *.mysite.thissite.com to Trusted sites in IE 7 and then add http://anothersite.mysite.thissite.com to the Local Intranet zone in IE this won't work, the site added with the wildcard takes precedence. This works fine in Internet Explorer 6.

I have had numerous support requests because of this issue over the past 6 months. Microsoft has now confirmed that this is a bug and has issued a hot fix to resolve this issue:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/939940/en-us

Note: this is a special request hot fix, there is now a download for this directly from Microsoft at this time - you have to follow the instructions in the link above to request the fix from Microsoft and they will then email it to you.

IE7: Site added to Local intranet zone stays in Internet zone

Ted Fitch — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 22:04:00 GMT

Many InfoPath solutions that use SharePoint for hosting require that the web site that the form is published to be located in the Local intranet zone in Internet Explorer. For Corporate Intranet sites this is usually not an issue because the website will automatically come up in the Local intranet zone by default and no user intervention is required.

However, there are situations when user intervention is required and the user must add the website to the local intranet zone manually through Internet Explorer. Two examples of situations where this often occurs is for users who access the Corporate network through VPN or for SharePoint sites that are extranet enabled.

Recently I have seen a number of support requests from IE7 users who had followed well documented "Add the site to your local intranet" instructions only to find that the setting would not save in Internet Explorer. Upon further investigation I discovered that these users would attempt to add a site to the local intranet zone only to be told by IE that the site already existed in the Internet zone. Here is the message that these users reported to me:

When the users clicked Yes to move the site from the Internet zone to Local intranet the site would appear in the list of local intranet sites (as expected). However, when the user applied the changes and exited out of the Internet options dialog box the site would not be moved to the Local Intranet zone. In fact, upon further investigation, a user could actually add multiple instances of the same site to the local intranet zone at the same time which is not supposed to be allowed by IE.

The only solution for this issue that I have found is to have the users reset their Internet Explorer settings:

Close all instances of IE and other applications (close all windows)
Open IE, click on Tools | Internet Options
Select Advanced from the tab options
Click on Reset

NOTE: You should only use the Reset Internet Explorer settings option as a last resort option as the dialog box indicates above.

AutoComplete does not work in InfoPath 2007 and Windows Vista

Ted Fitch — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 21:05:00 GMT

"AutoComplete" in InfoPath is a handy feature. For users that fill out many forms or similar forms over and over again "AutoComplete" allows users to quickly select previously entered text from a drop down list in the InfoPath client. This can save a lot of time for end users depending upon the form and data being entered.

Recently a client opened a bug for a form we had created - the client wanted me to "add AutoComplete back to the form" and wanted to know why we had removed such a handy feature from the form ("Enable AutoComplete" in display options for text boxes was checked).

Upon further investigation it looks like this is a bug with Vista and InfoPath 2007 and I have been able to repro this on several different Vista setups to verify; by default as in InfoPath 2003 the "Enable AutoComplete" option is turned on for text boxes in Vista, toggling this control has no effect on the behavior of this issue.

Here is an image showing the AutoComplete working in XP and not working in Vista in InfoPath 2007: