XP and the inability to access encrypted sites....I am still having problems accessing encrypted sites even after trying the following. I installed the encryption pack for Win2000 since that is the only one the system would take. Please help, as I refuse to be beaten by this vexing problem.
zdnetindia.com
Internet Explorer 6 nightmares
The telltale shopping cart
The nightmare:
IE 6 won't let me make secure purchases on the Web. What's the deal?
I'm shopping the Web for some new Betty Boop items to add to my 2,500-piece collection, but whenever I click to check out my shopping cart, I either get an error page or IE tells me it supports only 0-bit security. IE isn't letting me make any kind of secure Web transaction. Help me fast, before some other collector snatches up the last clock!
Analysis:
Hey, what do you know: when you install a new version of IE, sometimes it breaks something else. OK, we're not telling you anything new, but that is usually what causes this particular problem. IE 6 has broken or damaged the DLLs (dynamic link libraries) that provide the encryption feature in IE. You'll have to replace those DLLs, which should restore IE's ability to support 128-bit encryption.
Advice:
First, it pays to make sure you've enabled encryption in IE; it's possible that you or someone else accidentally disabled encryption. Go to Tools > Internet Options and, in the dialog box, click the Advanced tab. (Yes, you'd think the encryption options would be under the Security tab, but they aren't.) Scroll through the list of Advanced options until you come to the Security section at the very end of the options list. Make sure both Use SSL 2.0 and Use SSL 3.0 are checked. SSL stands for Secure Socket Layer and is the name for the encryption technology used on the Web. SSL 3.0 is the more recent standard. Most browsers, however, including IE, support both 3.0 and the older SSL 2.0 protocols.
If your encryption is turned on but still doesn't work, you'll need to attempt to repair the damaged DLLs. For Windows Me users, Microsoft recommends a rather complex and tedious set of steps in its Knowledge Base article. If you feel up to that much manual tweaking, go right ahead, but we recommend that you proceed with the following reinstall method, which should work for Windows 98 and above.
First,download the 128-bit encryption pack to your hard drive. Locate the downloaded file and run it to reinstall the encryption pack. Since you're running IE 6, the download page may indicate that you already have 128-bit encryption (every version of IE since 5.01 has included 128-bit encryption) and don't need to download it. Just ignore that message; go ahead and download the encryption pack and reinstall it. That should take care of the problem. |
