What makes IE 6 & 7 report 'Operation Aborted'?

Question

Recently an application I wrote started not working on Internet Explorer. There has been no change to the underlying (ruby on rails) code.

In IE 6 or IE 7, I can make one request (HTTP Post) to the app, but when I try to make a 2nd request, I get an "Operation Aborted" message. Everything works fine in firefox. The HTTP Request and Response headers are exactly the same. The response header for the correct and incorrect results both have the same content-length (about 104k). The correct response has the full content, but the incorrect response has the content cut off after bout 40k. (So about 65k of the response is just gone.)

The even trickier thing is that if I use the IP address instead of the domain name to make the request, everything works great.

This is an apache2 web server.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

I found this Microsoft support article:

BUG: Error message when you visit a Web page or interact with a Web application in Internet Explorer: "Operation aborted"

SYMPTOMS

When you visit a Web page or you interact with a Web application, you receive an Internet Explorer dialog box that contains the following error message: Internet Explorer cannot open the Internet site http://<Web site>.com. Operation aborted.

CAUSE

This problem occurs because a child container HTML element contains script code that tries to modify the parent container element of the child container. The script code tries to modify the parent container element by using either the innerHTML method or the appendChild method.

WORKAROUND

To work around this problem, write script blocks that only modify closed containers or that only modify the script's immediate container element. To do this, you can use a placeholder to close the target container, or you can move the script block into the container that you want to modify.

Answer 2

You could try to debug the issue using Fiddler. It's free HTTP Proxy tool for Internet Explorer.

It lists every detail of the request and response. Maybe you can see the actual cause of that behaviour inspecting the whole HTTP traffic.

Hope this helps!

alt text http://i.msdn.microsoft.com/Bb250446.ie_introfiddler_fig04(en-us,VS.85).gif