kb305153 resurgence in Win XP sp2?

We use .net to put together some dynamic pdf pages (using itextsharp). Users of Internet Explorer on Windows XP SP2 are reporting that they are experiencing the problems described by http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=305153.

Namely, when clicking on a link whcih dynamically generates a pdf file, but doesn't have a url ending in .pdf, IE displays a blank window.

The kb article fingers the host headers as the problem (namely, the content-length). This is the host header returned from a Url like the one in question:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0
Date: Mon, 20 Sep 2004 18:40:38 GMT
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
X-AspNet-Version: 2.0.40607
Cache-Control: private
Content-Type: application/pdf
Content-Length: 25774

Users of other browsers, and older Windows operating systems have no trouble with the links. Has anyone seen this behavior, or have any suggestions about how we can fix this on our end (other than the "Save-To-Desktop" workaround, or having the user change their acrobat settings to "Do-Not-Open-As-Plugin")?

Thanks,
Luke

Hello Luke, I don't know if this will help you or answer your question.

I have the same issue but I right click on the pdf link and save it to my computer without a problem.

I have SP2 installed and internet security set to high on IE6. I have to place everything I want to connect to in the Internet security safe sites list to display activex, scripting etc.

E.g. to be able to reply to you, I had to set this link in my safe site list to use this.

It's a pain but I feel pretty safe surfing the net.

Roger

Hi Luke

Try to press and hold the CTRL-key while clicking on the link and look if it helps. The CTRL key overrides protection. Dunno if you could expect that your users do the same thing each time though...

Good luck,
Peter

jukes1 wrote:

any suggestions about how we can fix this on our end (other than the "Save-To-Desktop" workaround, or having the user change their acrobat settings to "Do-Not-Open-As-Plugin")?

I've managed to solve a similar problem in the past in two different ways;

The first is to return a Content-Type of "application/x-unknown" or "application/x-msdownload" which forces IE to just display a file download dialog.

The other is to add an extra parameter onto the URL (e.g. doc.aspx?docid=123&ext=.pdf). For some reason, this seems to help IE out and also seems to resolve the problem.

Hope that helps,
Theo

If I'm spitting out anything other than html I add the extra dummy parameter for IE. Like ...&output=temp.csv for excel output, or &output=temp.pdf