CRM 4.0 and Internet Explorer 6

Unfortunately most corporate customers are still using IE6, this has a number of knock on effects even when fully patched

• Listing screens can popup a “download file” box asking if you want to download a file called Blank.aspx. Apparently this is a problem with a recent service patch for IE6. The completely unsupported fix for this is to locate the blank.aspx file in the CRM web directory usually in the c:\program files\Microsoft CRM Server\CRMWeb\ folder and change this file so that it actually outputs some text. This can be done by adding the line

<% Response.Write(“Loading…”) %>

Or something similar below the existing content in the file. Restart IIS with an IISRESET and you should no longer receive the error

• This is by far the most serious one and caused literally weeks of diagnosis with the help of Microsoft UK CRM Support after logging a critical issue. Lots of fun creating memory dumps with ADPlus and getting 5-6 users to hammer the system to try to recreate the intermittent issue. The number of Simultaneous Downloads in IE 6 is 2, occasionally CRM will try to download more than 2 items at the same time and this will hang the Outlook client for 5 minutes until it times out with an eventual “an error occurred message”. The eventual fix for this was KB 282402 which is a per user setting so has to be applied with a AD group policy so that it is applied when the user logs in.

CRM 4.0 and McAfee Virus Scanner

I was out with a customer recently and he asked me to look at why their CRM server was running so slowly. After running performance monitor on their server and looking at counters for Memory, CPU, SQL, IIS, CRM Async I couldn’t see any of them taking a hit. This was a 8 processor server with 16GB of RAM but opening a contact or account took 4 to 5 seconds.

As soon as I disabled the McAfee “On Access Scanner” opening a contact or account came down to 1 second. Microsoft support have acknowledged this as a known issue.