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Since around 10th May (a couple of days after the recent IE autoupdate), a web application which has worked without problem for several years has developed intermittent problems with data posted from a form not being received by our server scripts.
Having not been able to find the cause of this, we firstly tried the application on three different servers (all Linux) at different ISPs and the same problems occurred. We then completely re-wrote the application using an embedded Flash form rather than conventional HTML forms as in the original. Exactly the same problems occurred with the data posted from Flash not being received by the server (although the request itself reached the server and the script in question was activated).
After further investigation of the server logs we have now discovered the cause of the problem: namely that the POST requests are getting changed to GET requests! This happens only intermittently and under specific circumstances which we cannot determine. It happens for each of IE5, IE6 and IE7. The problem is not specific to a particular user location as it has been experienced by users from several quite distinct organisations and sites. Since both versions of the application, HTML and Flash are explicitly sending the data via POST, the changing of POST to GET must be occuring either within the browser or by something at the server end prior to the data reaching the script.
As I have been able to find no other occurrences of this problem reported on the web so far, it may be specific to the data that is getting posted. Briefly, the data is around 1K in length, and consists of sequences of comma-separated numbers, textual comments, some data markers surrounded by angled brackets, a few $ signs, a few forward slashes and a few @ signs. The problem occurs when this data is POSTed either as a single variable (in the Flash version of the application) or as a number of distinct variables in the original version.
Given that this problem arose very shortly after the recent IE updates and since absolutely nothing has changed from previously when it was working unproblematically (and had done so for six years), we suspect either the IE update as the principal candidate for the cause of this (though if by chance our ISPs have installed Apache updates over this period, that is also a candidate).
Any further news about similar problems or suggestions as to causes would be greatly appreciated.
