Hi all.

This issue was blogged on the 16th by Laurence Liu - it looks like other people are having this problem as well, which is nice to know (I've been wondering if it was just us). And the suggested workaround from Laurence indicates why big corporates we are working with are not seeing it.

If you run Vista and open an Office 2007 document, you tend to get prompted to authenticate before the document will appear. Whether you do or not, you normally get to see the document (at least, that's what happens at our office where we don't run a proxy server).

If you run a proxy, you don't seem to get prompted. Microsoft are looking at trying to isolate the exact scenario that causes this issue, but in the mean time they have identified a group of IE settings that will work if your environment does not use a proxy server.

Normally, you can tick the checkbox in IE settings that says "Automatically Detect Settings" and this will make the problem disappear. If this doesn't work, you will need to "Fake" a proxy server.

1. Click the Proxy Server checkbox. Set the address to "fake proxy" without the quotes and the port to 80.
2. Click the "Bypass proxy server for local addresses" checkbox.
3. Click Advanced and put an * in the Exceptions list to cause all addresses (including external ones) to be bypassed.

If I get a chance in the next few weeks, I'll try and look at the network traffic to see what comms are going out and what triggers the prompt. Is it an issue users running NTLM only face? If you run Negotiate, does the problem go away? what's the url it's hitting to get the prompt (this should appear in the IIS logs)? etc...

See you soon.

Brad