HTML content variation

A challenging problem. I've done a lot of troubleshooting. So please excuse
the lengthy discription, but I'm trying to narrow your thinking up-front.


My laptop and desktop are highly similar environments (details below), but
on (at least) one particular page of a web site, they receive slightly
different html pages from virtually identical http-gets. Both machines have
two browsers and both browsers behave the same on the misbehaving PC and
both perform properly on the good PC machine. They all work properly on
other pages from this web site.

When I manually ompare the HTML source code received by the good machine and
the bad one, there is always a one line difference between the downloads.
The line is missing from the bad download. The line is always:

h ref="/ads/"Adult Services /a

When I manually move the properly received file onto the bad machine, it
renders properly. When I manually move the improperly received file on the
bad machine to the good machine, it renders the same as the bad machine.

When I examine the http-get host header, I see only one parameter in the
good machine's "get" that is not present in the bad machine's "get". That
parameter is "infopath.1". I do not understand this parameter, nor how this
difference could account for the different received files.

At one time, Internet Content Advisor was enabled on the bad machine. My
troublesheting has disabled it. But maybe the registry is out of sync for
this application? This has been the focus of my troubleshooting, but I do
not see how it could be responsible for different http responses.

The two environments

Both machines are running XP-SP3, updated to current levels
both running IE-8 and Firefox, updated properly
both PCS are on the same LAN segment. They are side by side in my office
The bad machine is running Norton Internet Security 2006 and MS Office Suite
2002.
The good machine is running Earthlink Protection Center v7 and MS Office
Suite 2003

This problem is not intermittent.

Either the server is delivering two different downloads, or something on my
bad machine is intercepting the html and removing a line of code!

I'm out of troubleshooting ideas !!!

"allenx" wrote:

The bad machine is running Norton Internet Security 2006

That would be pretty-much my de-facto definition of a 'bad machine'

About the only worse machine would be one with a hardware fault.

"allenx" wrote:

The bad machine is running Norton Internet Security 2006

That would be pretty-much my de-facto definition of a 'bad machine'

About the only worse machine would be one with a hardware fault.