ASP.NET session state service dies with Internet Explorer 11 only

Question

I'm a web developer, so I'm always checking my work on localhost. Starting a few weeks ago, if I use IE11 to connect to localhost, I inevitably get an error about the ASP.NET Session State server not being available. Note that I run the service and don't use in-proc session state. No other browsers cause this behavior.

Does anyone have any idea what could cause this? It doesn't happen right at the start of the session, but typically a few pages in. But I can now consistently re-create the problem. If I connect to my local (virtual) system from another virtual system running IE8, I don't have a problem. I have not tried IE11 on another virtual system, so I suppose I should hesitate to blame it directly. But it is definitely the cause locally.

System setup: Macbook Pro running Parallels 9 with virtual systems. Primary virtual system is Windows 7.

Answer 1

I had this exact same issue - when I load the website from localhost in IE, a couple of pages later it will crash the session state server, and it crashes it for all other browsers until I restart the whole computer (restarting the session state server did not help). Mine seems to reproduce almost every time - you can't get past 3 pages without it happening. I uninstalled Fiddler but that didn't help.

I noticed it doesn't seem to happen if you use 127.0.0.1 or the computer's IP to access the website.

With that in mind, I set the web.config setting for the state server to '127.0.0.1:42424' instead of 'localhost:42424':

<sessionState cookieless="false" timeout="120" mode="StateServer" stateConnectionString="tcpip=127.0.0.1:42424" />

And it hasn't happened since :)