IE6 insists intranet site is restricted and blocks cookies

Hello group,

I've been building a configuration application designed to be placed on a
piece of hardware our company sells. This application is simply a set of
PHP/HTML which runs off a small server directly on the box.

Everything works fine in Opera, Firefox and IE7, but when the application
is loaded in IE6, the Privacy Policy "eye" pops up in the bottom right
hand corner and tells me that the internal site is restricted and cookies
have been blocked.

The application uses a single cookie to track the user's changes as they
progress through all the configuration pages. Without this cookie, users
are stuck on the first page. The URI of the internal site is
http://webdev/_/webif/

I've been googling for solutions all day and here is what I've tried, none
of which has worked:

- Changed the URI to http://webdev/aaa/webif/ to see if it was the
underscore
- Added a complete functioning P3P policy in http://webdev/w3c/ (spent
*many* hours on this!)
- Added a compact P3P policy header to the application
- Reduced security settings for *all* zones to Low, and Accept All Cookies
- When viewing the privacy policy for http://webdev/_/webif/, selected
"Always allow this site to use cookies"
- Deleting cached P3P data from
HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet
Settings\P3P\History\webdev
- Adding http://webdev/ to the Trusted Sites zone
- Deleting all entries from the Restricted Sites list
- Accessed the site using the IP address and full DNS domain name
(webdev.internal.example.com) rather than the plain "webdev" DNS name -
these changed the zone from "Local intranet" to "Internet", but still no
luck

My mind is boggling here. Is this some sort of "feature" of IE6 which can
be bypassed? Is there anything else I can try?

Any help would be greatly appreciated, however I would prefer a solution
which doesn't require the user to modify IE6, so it doesn't put the onus
on the users we plan to distribute this to. Is there some way I can
convince IE6 that my intranet cookies are not bad?

Thanks muchly in advance,
Grey

 

....

Try tracing the two IE cases with ProcMon? What are the differences?

If it is something which was broken in IE6 and fixed in IE7 you might
be out of luck.

BTW you are likely to find better discussions on web development issues
on the MSDN web forum for IE web development.


Good luck

Robert Aldwinckle
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