Internet Explorer Cannot Download Office Documents from an IIS Server When Content Expiration Is Set to Expire Immediately

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Article ID : 317208 Last Review : January 31, 2007 Revision : 2.3

This article was previously published under Q317208

SYMPTOMS

When you try to download Microsoft Office documents from a server running Internet Information Services (IIS) to a client using Microsoft Internet Explorer version 6, you may receive the following error messages:

Internet Explorer cannot download File.doc from ServerName.

Internet Explorer was not able to open this Internet Site. The requested site is either unavailable or cannot be found. Please try again later."

Note:This problem is not reproducible with any other known file types.

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CAUSE

This behavior occurs when the Content Expiration option in the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) Headers, within IIS, is set to Expire Immediately. Internet Explorer must save any Microsoft Office file to the local cache directory, and then use the associated application to open the file. If you set Content Expiration to Expire Immediately, the Office documents are not cached locally and the operation fails.

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RESOLUTION

When you configure the HTTP Headers within IIS for the Virtual Directory (or for the Directory) that contains Office documents, do not set Content Expiration to Expire Immediately.

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MORE INFORMATION

This is a known cause of slow performance on a Web server running IIS.
This is not a best practice.

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APPLIES TO

• Microsoft Internet Information Services 5.1 • Microsoft Internet Information Services 5.0 • Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0, when used with:     Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server     Microsoft Windows 2000 Datacenter Server     Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional Edition     Microsoft Windows 2000 Server

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Keywords: 

kbdocerr kbpending kbprb KB317208