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Question

Can Explorer get bored?

Jun 1, 2012 12:32AM PDT

I use Internet Explorer in kiosk mode to display content on a screen. The display is on a single webpage which refreshes regularly to display different messages pulled from a database. Everything runs fine for around 6 hours then for no obviuos reason Explorer says the website can not be found. There is no problem with the internet connection.

The really strange part is that if I then close the browser and re-open it in non-kiosk mode it still won't display the page. If I then navigate to some other page (eg Google) and then go back to the page I want to display everything works fine. It's as if Explorer has got bored and is refusing to display the page I want until I let it go to some other website and then back again.

This all happens with different versions of explorer and on machines running XP and Windows 7. Anyone got any ideas?

Discussion is locked

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Clarification Request
Where is that database?
Jun 1, 2012 8:45AM PDT

If IE is failing to find the content then it looks like a failure in contact with that database.

Mark

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Database not the problem
Jun 3, 2012 6:54AM PDT

The database is not the problem. If that were it then IE would display the page content with the database bits missing but it doesn't. It just shows the standard website can not be found screen. As I explained, there is nothing wrong with the connection and navigating away from the page clears the problem.

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Answer
This calls for some experiments.
Jun 3, 2012 7:07AM PDT

1. How does IE behave in non-kiosk mode?
2. How do other browsers behave (the kiosk-mode in Firefox is F11, don't know about Chrome).
3. Study the webserver log to see if there's something strange with the first failing request.

Kees