IE6 & Word 2002 ... session not inherited?

[Chris J]

Hi all,

[[ X-Posted as wasn't sure which group'd be better to ask ]]

I'm having a problem with Word 2002 when downloading a Word document with
IE6. This is in an intranet application, and the download occurs through an
ASP that does security checks (amongst other things) before passing the
document back to the client.

What seems to be happening is that, when the ASP sets a content-type of
application/msword, Internet Explorer starts Word and passes it the URL of
the document, and Word then tries to download the document directory. This
causes a problem as Word does not seem to get any of the session information
about the login, so is denied access to the file. The preferred behaviour
would be either for IE6 to download the file, and pass a temporary filename
to Word, or for Word to inherit the session so the download succeeds.

If I use a machine that does not have office installed, or choose "Save"
rather than "Open" when IE6 prompts for an action, then the document is
downloaded sucessfully and displayed embedded within IE6 without any
problem, indicating that IE6 is handling the download of the document rather
than Word. Thus I know the underlying ASP itself doesn't have any obvious
problems.

Has anyone got a solution for this? I've come across old (circa. 2002) posts
in Google regarding similar problems, but no solution seems to be
forthcoming. Q314535 on the MSDN details the same/similar problem with
Powerpoint, but I've not seen a related one for Word.

This has been tested with vanilla Office 2002, and also, SP1, SP2 and SP3
with IE6 SP1 (+ Q810847, Q813951) on XP Pro SP1.

Cheers,

Chris...