09/16/2011 – Problem solved. See below.

\I don’t know why, but about a week ago I started getting a page that says “Unable to service request” whenever I try to get to Microsoft’s online documentation. At first it was just the MSDN documentation. Now it’s most any page that start with http://msdn.microsoft.com/.

This problem is very strange. If I try to visit the site with Google Chrome or Internet Explorer, I get the error. No problem with Firefox, though. It’s interesting to note that I haven’t fired up Firefox in many months. I wonder if my Chrome and IE installations are somehow corrupt?

I can access MSDN from other computers in the office, using IE or Chrome. And I can access it from my machine using curl, wget, and my own custom download program. It’s just IE or Chrome on my computer.

Any insight into the problem? I’m stumped. I suppose I could reinstall Chrome and see if that solves the problem.

Update 09/14: For Internet Explorer 8, I just had to turn on compatibility view. Perhaps it’s time to upgrade to IE 9? Firefox 3.6.18 (latest in the 3 series) works just fine.

Still no joy with Google Chrome. Others who want to view “old” sites with Chrome resort to silliness like running IE in a Chrome browser window. Whereas I’ll bow to the brilliance of the hack that makes such a thing possible, I can’t imagine why it should be necessary.

I wonder if this has been a problem for a long time, but has been hidden from me because the browser caches scripts. And, yes, I’m pretty convinced that the problem isn’t with the HTML so much as it is with scripts. If the MSDN site updated their scripts but didn’t change the version number, then pages could continue to work for a very long time.

I first experienced this problem on September 6. For several days prior to that I was doing a lot of JavaScript debugging, and had cleared the browser caches on IE and on Chrome in the process. I strongly suspect that doing so triggered this behavior. There’s no telling how long I was running with old scripts.

Update 09/16: After verifying that I could visit the site from my home computer, also running Chrome, and verifying that I was running the same version of Chrome at both sites, I had to conclude that it wasn’t the browser version. So here at the office this morning, I closed all of my Chrome windows and started up one. Then I went to Options and cleared all browsing data. Everything. Shut down Chrome, restarted it, and now I can see MSDN again.

So, if you run into this problem, Clear your browser cache! I thought I had done that. I might have cleared some of the data from the cache, but not all of it. So I just told it to delete all of the browsing data.