As I noted in my previous post, I’ve been having some trouble accessing MSDN information from my browser. I thought I’d solved the problem, but it came back this morning. I had been viewing pages on MSDN for a couple of hours while working, and at some point I clicked on a link and got the “Cannot Service Request” page again.

This happened on Chrome, and when I went to Internet Explorer to see if I could get to the page, IE wouldn’t display it either. Firefox, again, had no trouble.

My solution for IE, then, was to go into Tools -> Options, and delete the browsing history. I just deleted everything. Restarted the browser, and I was able to visit MSDN again.

With Chrome, I thought I’d try to narrow down the problem. I first went into Options and selected “Empty the cache.” That didn’t solve the problem. So I checked “Empty the cache” and “Delete cookies and other site and plug-in data.” That worked!

Apparently, something in the MSDN site is setting a cookie or storing other site-specific data that at some point causes the JavaScript to throw up its hands.

This is almost certainly a bug with the MSDN JavaScript. But at least now I know how to treat the symptom. It ticks me off, though, that I have to delete all my cookies and site-specific data in order to keep using the site. Maybe next time the problem occurs, I’ll see if I can delete just the MSDN-specific stuff.