Sharepoint Services 3.0 CSS not working

Question

Sometimes the style sheet disappears when naviguating on our WSS 3.0 sites (white background on the site, no colors, no formatting, etc.). This has mainly happened with IE6 (corporate browser for the majority of our computers). The fixes were :

• clean up temporary internet files
• if it still doesn't work, upgrade to IE 7

However, this time, the upgrade to IE 7 hasn't worked, the style sheet isn't applied. When we clean up temporary internet files, things go back to normal, but after a while the css disappears again.

Answer 1

Here are a few ideas on what you could try:

• Fiddler should be able to tell you if there is a network problem.

• Check the HTML for anything unusual. Is it malformed in any way? Can you save a copy and run it through an online validator (although this is limited in use as SharePoint's default markup isn't compliant).

• If some users are having the issues but others aren't, check their permissions on the server.

• You could also try using the SharePoint "Log in as another user" feature to see if the problem can be reproduced on your machine when logged in as them. You may also want to try running Internet Explorer as that user.

• Check the Event Viewer on both client and server for anything unusual.

• Check the IIS logs on the server for any errors.

• Check the SharePoint ULS logs on the server in the "12 Hive" for errors that might be related to this problem.

• Try running Process Monitor on the client and reproduce the problem. Search for keywords such as FAIL or ERROR to see if anything appears. Make a note of the time the problem occurs and see if the Process Monitor logs give any additional information.

Answer 2

Is there some javascript that's involved as well? Could it be a virus scanner that is set way to strict? As you pointed out in one of the comments, the CSS isn't even being requested (at IIS log level, which is as basic as you get, not even in SHarePoint yet), so it HAS to be something on the client PC.