[rescue] MS crap (was: Framemaker FYI)

[Caleb Shay]

On 2004-03-29 16:06:44 -0500 Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> 
wrote:

> 
>   The...DARK SIDE?  Wow.  Does this moron have any clue at all what 
> kind of 
> company Microsoft is, or how truly bad their products really are?  
> Does he 
> not understand the fact that the rest of the computer world made it 
> past 
> daily reboots twenty years ago?
> 

Just a little heads up for anybody out there who is responsible for 
any type of e-commerce site:

Speaking of bad MS products, I got bitten by a wonderful one today.  
One of the subscription sites at $WORK has recently had a huge drop 
off in new subscribers.  We couldn't figure out why until we tried to 
sign up using IE6 on XP today.  Go through the whole subscription 
process, clicky, clicky, get to the last page with the large form, 
submit and it fails, no data actually gets posted.  Turns out that a 
month ago MS pushed out a patch via Windows Update to IE that makes 
POSTs send no data if (and this is the good part) it's on an SSL 
server and you take more than 15 seconds to fill out the page.  As of 
today they are STILL pushing out this patch, and while there is a fix 
in the MS knowledge base, that is NOT available via Windows Update.  I 
spent 4 hours tracking down this problem and getting a workaround in 
place today, and who knows how many subscribers we've lost because 
they couldn't register.  Wish I could send MS a bill for this.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=831167

Cheers,

Caleb