My home computer has recently taken to not allowing me access to certain sites. The main site I am concerned with is my Hotmail account. Most other cookie driven sites are fine, but a few deny access, this being the most noticeable, as it only happened recently.
I have an old version of IE (5.0 I think), running on Win '95. It has all been running totally fine up until just last week. I never touched a thing in the settings before and have since checked everything I can see in the browser settings related to enabling cookies and security. Nothing seems to help.
Is there some other simple reason why an older version of IE would suddenly stop allowing cookies from being downloaded, or have Hotmail recently changed something to force users to upgrade to the newer versions of IE?
Am I going to have to download the upgrade (which will take ages on my 56k connection) or is there something other that may be going wrong?
I think whats happened is that your cookies have past their best before date ,and you may not have been to that particular site in a while.
One quickie , check your clock on the taskbar and make sure that the year is correct. I had a problem with logging into different sites , and the reason was that the year was set to 2014 instead of 2003.
If the above is fine , then purge your cookies , there should be an option in tools/internet options.
I had a similar problem on my laptop shortly after I got it in late December/early January, although I don’t know that mine is specifically cookie related. For me, the solution was to use Netscape for all secure sites from my laptop - that means hotmail, school e-mail, my banking…anything that takes me into a secure site, I have to use Netscape for.
If you already have Netscape on your computer, you might try accessing hotmail that way and see if you get in.
I was trying for about two days to fix this when I noticed the date was wrong (forward) and thought then the mystery was solved. So I reset the clock and re-started the computer. It didn’t help.
I’m not sure if I tried deleting all the existing cookies at the same time, so I’ll be sure to try that when I get home.
Strange thing is, as it wasn’t working recently, I tried to check my mail at my sisters computer and the same problem suddenly started happening on her computer as well.
That’s why I thought it might be some silly-bugger antics Hotmail was involved in.
I don’t have any other browsers loaded at present, but Netscape might also be worth a try.
Aro, same here, I’ve written to Hotmail (it’s definitely their bad) – no reponse yet.
I too am running some ye olde IE – IIRC 4.blah (can’t check now I’m away from home).
If you are prepared to delete your cache and all subscription data you’ll be able to connect again at least until you reboot, but that might be something you wouldn’t want to do – your call.
Hotmail never came back to me, but I finally got sick of having to delete my cache just to access four thousand pieces of spam so I spent a few minutes finding exactly which files need to be deleted – the good news is there are at most two of them (having narrowed it down to two, I felt that was enough).
In Temporary Internet Files they appear as:
login.srf?blah blah blah
and logout.srf?blah blah blah
If you use Explorer’s “Find” they appear as:
login.htm
and login.htm
And deleting these does the trick.
However, I hoped I could write a batch file to delete them, but, it seems that these files are invisible to MSDos? What gives? Even with the “show system and hidden files” switches dir /a:sh yields nothing – any suggestions?
I’m having the same problem with Hotmail … but I don’t seem to have these two files.
I check my Hotmail accounts every day, and for the last few days when I first try to sign in it tells me cookies aren’t enabled (they are) - I then hit the back button and try again, and it logs me in. However, switching between my four accounts is a pain … I have to do everything twice. :mad:
Hmm! I don’t think it is exactly the same problem, if I switch accounts Hotmail seems to be unaware that I have in fact logged out, so I too “have to do everything twice”.
On the subject of these files, what’s in your cache is not generally available under all operating systems, I use NT at work and Find sees nothing to match anything, at home (where I have my problem, I run Win95 on a clockwork computer).
Anyway, I’m glad you bumped the thread, some techie’ll be along any minute to answer all our questions…
