3.2.0

IE 6 crashes with AW CSS scrollbar style

I thought I'd post this issue in case anyone else has run into it, to avoid the many hours I spent tracking it down. My AW application is designed to replicate the look and feel of a desktop application, so I use "draggable" iframes in the main browser window as the individual screens of the application. AW provides the various form controls and grids used in the application screens. During testing of the application, however, I started seeing bizarre crashes where IE would die a horrible death. I isolated the crashes to dragging an iframe containing AW code. The problem only occurred in IE 6 on Windows 2000 machines. After numerous fruitless hours of debugging and tracing attempts, I did an exhaustive Google search and finally stumbled across the following reference to exactly the same problem:

http://www.webhostingtalk.nl/bugtraq-mailing-lijst/34969-ie6-css-crash.html

Further digging led to the following Microsoft Knowledge Base article:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/918967

The problem has presumably been fixed in Windows XP since I haven't encountered the problem there, but it has never been fixed in Windows 2000, despite the fact that the article claims the problem only occurs on XP machines.

Once I identified the cause of the crashes as the use of the scroll bar styles, I started looking for each possible scroll bar style in AW, and found that AW sets the "scrollbar-arrow-color" style in all of the aw.css files except for the xp skin. When I commented out that style in the aw.css files, the crash went away!

Now to some questions. I haven't actually seen any side-effects of commenting out that style, is it actually used anywhere? Is there a more effective way to disable that style to avoid the crash that doesn't involve editing the runtime files?
Randall Severy
March 23,
This attribute changes the appearance of the scrollbar in IE - it does not affect anything else and can be safely removed (last line of aw.css in classic, mono and aqua themes).
Alex (ActiveWidgets)
March 27,

This topic is archived.

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