IE 7 stops responding

Question

In our asp.net 2.0 web application, there is a user control with validation. For some reason, when the validation fails, the pages looks fine, however, no controls (asp buttons, scroll bars, or third party like Telerik text editor) respond to mouse inputs. The only work around is to resize the browser window which will make the UI responsive. Has anyone seen this issue before? What could be causing it?

Answer 1

Does it happen in other browsers? Are you talking client side validation or server side (does it actually post back?) Have you tried removing all CSS and seeing if it still happens? If it doesn't, add the css back bit by bit until it break again and youve found the culprit!

Answer 2

Check your CSS and/or javascript. It sounds like there is a transparent element (like a div) beging placed over the elements in the page.

Answer 3

I have seen IE freeze up when resizing if there are expressions in the CSS.

#container{
    width: expression(document.body.clientWidth > 1100)? "1100px" : "auto";
}

It's easy to get yourself into a situation where two elements are resizing based on each other, which can cause an infinite loop where the browser locks. In any case, expressions will stop working in IE8 standards mode, so they should be removed anyway.