Empty Postbacks on ASP.NET pages

Question

We are having a problem that seems to only be a problem when accessing our websites from internal intranet machines. When logged into the domain, and accessing our websites, postbacks are not working. Basically the page behaves as if it were refreshed and nothing was changed. When logging the GETs and POSTs with an HTTP analyzer, the post is complete empty and the ContentLength is 0. It is also very sporadic, but seems to be happening fairly often. In the case where it failed, we could see that there was an extra item in the Header for the POST, it was "Authorization" and the value was the word "Negotiate " followed by a space and then a bunch of characters and two equal symbols at the end, which looked like some kind of base64 encoded value. In a case where it succeeded, this Authorization item was no in the header, but I have logged more than one successful cases to know if that is consistent.

We have seen this occur only with IE8 so far, and when it occurs it is sometimes sporadic. I can close and open the browser and it will begin working sometimes, and other times it is still broken.

What might be causing the postback to be empty? This means the viewstate is not sent to the server which makes the page basically broken. It seems to certainly be a client side issue, but not sure if it's not aggravated by some server settings.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

We have resolved the issue by removing the site domain from the Local Intranet sites zone configuration in IE8, and moving them to the Trusted sites zone.

The problem is we will have to move pages that require windows authentication to another path that will stay in the Local Intranet zone configuration, so that automatic windows authentication will continue to work for those when users are on the intranet. My fear is that the problem will continue to occur for those sites, but hopefully not because the kb article seems to imply that it is only a problem when going from authenticated pages to non-authenticated pages: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/923155