Very Puzzled, Please Help

[schiefaw]

Hello,

I am developing a web application that contains a very complicated and
data intensive page. The application has been tested and deployed, but
now we are seeing problems.

Some form elements (drop-downs) are blanking out during the trip to the
server and back. This happens randomly and only on certain computers.
We have tried to duplicate the problem on our own machines with no
luck. I have watched the problem occur on the affected machines. The
users on those machines have used one of our machines and have not had
the problem there. And, we can duplicate the problem in the tet
environment if we use one of the affected machines to do it.

Both our tester's and the affected machines have the same version of
IE, but may have differing update levels of windows. All, I believe,
are on Win 2k.

There is some specualation that the problem may only occur when the
user has been active in the application for a while. This is hard to
establish, however, as the problem is intermittent anyway.

My best guess at this point is that the request or response object is
being corrupted, which causes the drop-down list to loose it's value.
There is also another very rare occurance of a problem where a static
drop-down list has its items list corrupted. In this case, the static
list will duplicate some items while removing others. I am leaning
towards a possible memory leak in the browser.

I should note that there are many many other users that have not had
any issues. All are running IE on some form of Windows.

I have run out of ideas. Can anyone else give me a clue on this?

Thanks,
A. Schieffer

 

[Guest]

If it might be the amount of time (timing out), consider adding JavaScript
that "logs" the person out after so many minutes. That will get around a lot
of potential errors. Kicking them to a "you are now logged out due to
inactivity" page is the most useful.

The actual values of controls are stored in Viewstate, which is a hidden
field on the page. It is not likely what is causing your errors, however.

--
Gregory A. Beamer
MVP; MCP: +I, SE, SD, DBA

***************************
Think Outside the Box!
***************************

 

[Marina]

It sounds like the issue is really somewhere on the client machines. I would
focus on looking versions of windows, IE, IE settings, etc. to really try to
narrow down what the affected machines have in common.

 

[schiefaw]

Our timeout is set to 1 hour and these issues occur in the middle of a
workflow. This app would have been much better as a desktop app, since
it is open all day. But, no one ever listens to the developer. I am
sure that it is not a timeout issue, however, as that would kick them
back to the login screen.