Unable to log onto secured websites

[Tech Support Guy]

I work in technical support for a financial institution,
and not a day goes by that I don't get AT LEAST 10 calls
from customers who are unable to access the secure
portions of our website. I always have them try to access
the secure login screen of other sites, and they always
get the dreaded "Page Cannot Be Displayed" message there
also. If you're running Win98 or WinME, you can just
reinstall IE, as it's usually corruption in the encryption
engine of the browser. But if you're running XP, this
doesn't work. I could not get any assistance from
Microsoft, so I began telling people to install Netscape
and just use that from now on. Maybe Microsoft will
eventually get the message, but I doubt it.

[Elijah]

I believe this is because XP (IE6) does not use the full list of CSP
(cryptographic service providers) when accessing secure sites.

It only uses (at least in my case) the Microsoft Base Cryptographic Service
Provider v1.0, and not the other stronger ones that are probably installed
on the machine.

I maybe totally miss diagnosing this but i have posted 3 times in this
newsgroup about a similar if not same issue with no response that resolved
the question.

I also work for a company that uses secure sites, however you have to go to
a site to create a certificate for the local machine.

It gives you a dropdown list of CSP's to choose from, but on certain
machines there is only the above one listed.

When digging deeper, the machine does have many more CSP's "installed"
however they do not show up.

We have just been installing Netscape on these machines and it works fine.

I wonder how related these cases are

Elijah

"Tech Support Guy" > wrote in message
...
> I work in technical support for a financial institution,
> and not a day goes by that I don't get AT LEAST 10 calls
> from customers who are unable to access the secure
> portions of our website. I always have them try to access
> the secure login screen of other sites, and they always
> get the dreaded "Page Cannot Be Displayed" message there
> also. If you're running Win98 or WinME, you can just
> reinstall IE, as it's usually corruption in the encryption
> engine of the browser. But if you're running XP, this
> doesn't work. I could not get any assistance from
> Microsoft, so I began telling people to install Netscape
> and just use that from now on. Maybe Microsoft will
> eventually get the message, but I doubt it.