IE11 intermittently not loading pages
Many of our users are reporting that they are getting a blank page when using IE11 to access our website. Sometimes they don't even get a blank page, the browser just stays on the last page visited. These users can access other domains (such as google.com) without a problem.
For the browsers that are failing, if those users disable Protected Mode in IE, then they can again access our site, but this isn't a good solution because we have thousands of users and we can't go telling each of them to reconfigure their browsers, not to mention that we're completely losing the business of those potential customers who just surf by, see a blank page, and then keep on going without filing an error report.
Firefox and Chrome work fine. Also, even when using IE11 in protected mode, some users have zero problem, their computers just seem to work.
We are running the site off of IIS7. Other sites on the same server run fine, it's just the one particular site that is having the problem, and it's intermittent, affecting some computers and not others.
There must be something I can do on my side in the server or network settings to keep this problem from happening, but I'm baffled as to what it might be. When I look at the network traffic on a browser that's failing, the GET request is just being aborted with no explanation. When looking at the traffic with Wireshark, I see no errors, and no errors are showing up in the IIS logs. Of the browsers that fail, they are not even opening a connection to our web server to make a GET request, the request is just aborting immediately.
Any advice appreciated!
(followup): Another test we did: We can reproduce the problem on our development server, with the same pattern of which computers "work" and which don't. We tried turning off the webserver, and the problem stayed consistent, we'd still get a blank page error. So it's obviously not to do with anything that's in our page content? I've run tests on 9 computers on our office network: 5 worked, 4 failed. We're all baffled. :/
(January 24 followup): We figured out what's causing the problem, but not how to fix yet. Deep in the Windows registry, a key is being set in a Zonemap folder, adding a "play.net" domain with a key value of 2. IE sees that key when someone types play.net, and quivers and dies without an error message (Firefox and Chrome handle it fine).
So next question, what is setting that key in the first place? Probably an ActiveX control somewhere, but we haven't had any luck finding it in this 15 year old site, as many of the coders who may have created ActiveX controls in the past are long gone.
Does anyone know of a way to scan an entire domain and list anything that might be twiddling a registry key?
Answer
Followup mail threads from Elonka indicated that some users had the play.net domain mapped to a specific / non-default Internet Explorer security zone, and those users were the ones having problems.