IE6 crashes while displaying simple site

Question

Hi,

I have a really strange problem with an quite simple ASP.NET (.NET 3.5) Site and the IE6.

It seems sometimes and on certain machines, the IE6 crashes while displaying the site. CSS was already eliminated as a reason for the crashes.

After a while of research, I was not able to find a reason for the crashes and could not reproduce it properly.

The site works on all browsers, except IE6 and it crashes only on certain machines, not everywhere.

Any idea what this could be?

[Edit] When IE crashes, I get the Windows-Exception Dialog and have to close IE6: not just a warning or something.

Answer 1

How exactly does IE 6 crash? If you are getting the infamous Operation Aborted error try moving any JavaScript to the foot of the page just above the closing tag to see if that helps.

Answer 2

I get the Windows-Exception Dialog and have to close IE6

Answer 3

Try looking at the event log (control panel/admin tools/event viewer) and then double click on application.

That might give you some clues.

Answer 4

IE 6 has multiple versions - Service Pack 1, Service Pack 2, Service Pack 3 and of course, no service pack. Try looking at the version information for the browser's on which it crashes and see if you can narrow down the problem there.

To try and see what the problem is, I suggest stripping down the page as much as possible, and adding elements to it until you can reproduce the problem.

IE 6 is bizarre. Check out this link:

http://immike.net/blog/2007/08/06/single-line-of-html-crashes-ie-6/

Where the author points out that it is possible to crash IE6 with a single line of valid HTML.

Answer 5

As you've already eliminated CSS as being the cause I would try checking that your HTML validates against your DOCTYPE, then try visiting the page with JavaScript disabled to see if either of these can be eliminated as well.

Answer 6

A couple of things you could try:

• Check if any IE plug-ins (toolbars, etc) are installed on the machines in question, and try disabling all of them.
• Check the Windows Event Log to see if the crash has left any clues.

If you want to get really hardcore, you could follow Mark Russinovich's Guide to analyzing the process crash data to determine what if anything could be causing the issue. In his case it turned out to be an Nvidia component that caused IE to randomly crash.

Answer 7

I assume this has already been solved (at least I hope by now) but I just had a very similar question asked.

The answer for my problem was that input tags were not being closed and the page's DTD was XHTML which has OMITTAG NO as the default.

So you may want to ensure that all tags are either self-closed (Which will validate XHTML transitional, not Strict) or with

Good luck, Jeremy