Can't login by IE 8 on private domain, Firefox & Chrome work fine

Question

I'm deploying a .NET website on a private domain. Trying to login using IE 8 (the only allowed browser) just refreshes the log-in screen back, and can't redirect to next page.

Some notes: - Problem never occurs with Firefox or Chrome (so probably not a security issue). - There are already other websites published on the same network that use IE-8 with no problem. - Tried to disable all javascripts in both login.aspx and Master page. - Tried to add <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge"/> with different values in "content" (IE=8, IE=EmulateIE8...) with no luck.

• Running the application from VS solution on deployment server works fine, but after publishing on IIS, same problem occurs.

Any suggestions??

Edit: I could narrow the resolution area: IE 8 does not keep session variables! I tried to redirect the login to a plain page that doesn't use session variables and it worked. Also, when I replaced the session variable with a constant value in the directed page, it worked. So the questions becomes: how to preserve session variables between pages programmatically?

Answer 1

Solved! I spent weeks in this problem before I found, by chance, that IE8 cannot keep session variables/cookies for URLs that contain "underscore" in the domain name!! Thanks to the this link.

I still don't know if there's a workaround to make IE accept the underscore without changing the domain name. But at least we have a baseline solution for the client. Cheers