Having tried out a new piece of software called Whoson, i've suddenly realised that the majority of users accessing our site with Windows XP and IE6 are having problems. You can see this because they come onto the site on one of the landing pages but never fetch any files from the server other than the aspx page - no images, or javascript files or webresource.axd files. Then their session immediately (within milliseconds) redirects to the root of the site (stem only) on which i have a 301 redirect to the site home page /shop/default.aspx. And the same happens for the home page i.e. nothing other than the aspx is loaded. And that's the end - of course the user goes away or in some cases you can see them try again a bit later and fail again.

The user-agent for the failed accesses is either of the 2 below (but the site also does sometimes work with these).
Mozilla/4.0+(compatible;+MSIE+6.0;+Windows+NT+5.1;+SV1)
Mozilla/4.0+(compatible;+MSIE+6.0;+Windows+NT+5.1;1813)

The site seems to work for all non XP + IE6 user-agents and it also works for XP + IE6 user-agents where the user-agent contains any version of .NET CLR .
NB. i understand that XP SP3 installs various patches for IE6 including one that removes the long tail from the user-agent string. Is this true ? Does it retain +SV1 ?. It could be that SP3 is the route of the problem. I will be going back to examine older log files to see if the problem was occurring before the release of SP3.

I am using a modified out of the box theme and also have google analytics scripts installed which may be part of the problem but i'm reluctant to remove them because we depend on the analytics for our business analysis.
site is: http://www.beauty2u.com

I have tried several machines here with with various versions of Win XP and IE6 and they all work fine. I did observe it fail once on a copy of XP Pro (without any SPs) but unfortunately i didn't manage to packet capture when i saw it so i can't get any extra info about how far through the various file fetches the browser got or whether it was stuck in a loop. When it failed IE6 seemed to be stuck - as if the page never completely fetched. But it wasn't locked up because you could type a new URL in the address bar and it worked ok.

If you have XP + IE6 could you please try to access our site and tell me what happens. If poss, please try and packet capture the access using Microsoft Network Monitor 3.1 or something similar.
start on a typical landing page like http://www.beauty2u.com/shop/Fake-Tan-Intro.aspx

Any other ideas welcome

Thanks

Richard

Richard,

It looks like you are being scanned by AVG. See http://www.webmasterworld.com/search_engine_spiders/3615360.htm

Yea, I'm as up to date as anyone can be without buying a new machine and running Vista and IE7 or FF3... but don't close-out those who are a few updates behind the curve. They have credit cards too.