Anonymous Users prompted to login for friendly url

Question

I have a SharePoint site with anonymous access enabled for some pages. All the pages on the site use Friendly URLs. However, occasionally anonymous users will be prompted to log in when trying to access a page which should be open to anonymous users.

If an authenticated user browses the page, anonymous users will then be able to access the page successfully.

Why are anonymous users unable to view the page until an authenticated user does so?

Answer 1

This was caused by a configuration setting in the web.config of the web application in use.

Specifically the 'compilation' element in the 'system.web' section had its 'batch' attribute set to true.

Setting this to false corrected the issue

This technet article explains the problem in detail.