Internet Explorer 7 and 8 – Unable to Download Files Over SSL Connection

We recently installed Qualtrax on a new IIS 7 server and put it under the scope of a SSL certification so users had to access the site through the https:// protocol.  When they tried to use the Automatic File Transfer tool, however, they were getting the following error:

Internet Explorer cannont download AutoFileTransfer.aspx from …

Internet Explorer was not able to open this Internet site.  The requested site is either unavailable or not found.

 

This problem actually isn’t confined to Qualtrax. As behind the scenese, when you are using the Automatic File Transfer tool, Qualtrax sends you a file in a proprietary format (Extension .qtxxml) which the Automatic File Transfer tool on the client machine will process.

First I made sure that the .qtxxml extension was included in my valid MIME types on the Internet Information Services 7.0 on my web server. That didn’t fix the issue, so some research was in order and this Microsoft Knowledgebase Article explained the behavior:

Internet Explorer file downloads over SSL do not work with the cache control headers

When files are sent down through an SSL connection to Internet Explorer with the “Cache-control:no-store” or “Cache-control:no-cache” header, the issue occurs. Internet Explorer acts like the site isn’t even there.

I found a couple of fixes.
1) You can do the registry update suggested in the Knowledgebase article.
2) You can use Firefox or Chrome
3) Upgrade Internet Explorer to version 9.

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