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May 23, 2003

Strange msn.com issue...
Posted by Jess in Tech Talk

I had an interesting browser issue yesterday.

Matt’s computer and my own are on the same router. Matt could get to msn.com with no problems.

Me, on the other hand, had not been able to get there for a week. Whenever I did, the following message appeared instead:

Error type 500: Server too busy

Bizarre. At first I just assumed it wasn’t working, but then after a few days, it was a little strange that I wasn’t reading about it on the other news sites. So finally, yesterday, I started asking around. Everyone else could get to it.

Found the solution... apparently Opera users have difficulty with language settings and MSN.com. They have to go in and change some ini params. So, on a whim I checked out the language settings in Internet Options in IE. For some reason, "English (United States)" was NOT the first choice.

"User Defined" settings were first. So I reordered English to the top, applied the change, tried msn.com again, and it worked.

I can only assume that my computer settings got toaster-caked when Matt installed the Japanese language pack on my machine to show me some cool stuff he’s working on. But why it waited all that time to show itself is beyond me. Interestingly enough, there were LOTS of people on Google whose MSN.com mysteriously stopped working last week. I even found a couple of blog entries surrounding it last week.

I guess I made a change on my machine the same day some msn.com engineer made another change on their machine, and then the lunar eclipse happened, which shut off some other solar powered machine which… aww forget it. Can I just blame El Nino like everyone else always does?

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Comments

No Opera language problems here -- I just point the Bork edition at MSN and it works. Okay, maybe that does _result_ in one or two language problems, but it isn't _caused_ by any.

Posted by: Stan Rogers at May 23, 2003 04:35 PM

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Well, I found out why I had the 'user defined' settings in there.
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=user+defined+ie-ee&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&selm=390E0382.2CF128B2%40mail.com&rnum=3

I guess eons ago I remember finding this Easter Egg I wanted to try. I did a search, and someone else had the same problem and re-setting English back to the top fixed the problem for them, too.

Strange...

Posted by: Jess at May 24, 2003 12:33 PM

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