E.1.5- Typical Problems of PWS on Win9x

Typical Problems of PWS on Win9x

Over the years I have helped many students to get PWS running. In turn, many experts have passed their knowledge on to me. Here are our solutions to the most common problems.

First, Be Sure You are Testing Correctly

Many times I have been asked to give a hand troubleshooting an ASP install. It appears that ASP is not working correctly, but I find that the problem is in the test page. I suggest that you test with a page from the ASP RoadMap (more later) or else the simple test file we'll look at a little further on in this chapter. If you are using your own test page and have problems, then check for the following common errors:

• File name does not end in .asp or the test page is misspelled in the browser address.
• Incorrect path for the page.
• VBScript is missing the delimiters <%%> or <SCRIPT> tags.
• VBScript has errors in syntax
• Check that PWS is running by either looking for its symbol in the tray or by Start | Programs | Microsoft Personal Web Server | Personal Web Manager and seeing the Stop button displayed.
• Also, on a few occasions when I created a page after PWS was running, I needed to stop and restart before PWS could find the page.

Opening an ASP Page Launches Visual Interdev, FrontPage or PhotoShop

When trying to load a local (127.0.0.1) ASP page, Windows opens up Adobe Photoshop or VID instead. Regular .htm or .html pages view fine in the browser. In other cases the browser will load the ASP page, but also start Photoshop. This usually does not happen when viewing .asp pages sitting on a non-local host.

Solution

The problem here is that there is a support file for Photoshop that has the .asp extension. We want to change the association for .asp to our editor. You can change the association by starting Windows Explorer then clicking on the menu View | Options | Win95-FileTypes | Win98-FileOptions. Click on ActiveServerDocument | Edit | Actions-Edit and set this to the same as the file type of Internet Document Set.

If there is no Active Server Document file type listed, then you need to find what file type is currently assigned to .asp and change it to be associated with your browser. Unfortunately Windows does not offer an alphabetical list of extensions, so do this:

1.    Add a New Type.

2.    Give it Description=test and Associated Extension = .ASP and click OK to save.

3.    Windows will respond that .ASP is already taken by xxx. Make a note of the xxx file type and click OK to exit the error message.

4.    Click Cancel to exit the Add New File Type dialog box.

5.    Find and select the xxx file type in the list of files types.

6.    Click Edit and change as follows:

Description of Type = Active Server Document

Content Type = text/asp

Default Extension for Current Type = .asp

7.    Under Actions = Edit:

Enter your location of IE software, for example "C:\PROGRA~1\INTERN~1\iexplore.exe".

Click the icon for .asp files in a Photoshop.sep table.

In some cases the above will not work because Windows does not let you create the new file type. You will have to first delete the old association by hand in the registry as follows.

1.    Start | Run | Regedit

2.    Select HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT

3.    Select the .asp folder

4.    Find the key that has the PhotoShop.SepTablesFile value in it

5.    Delete the data (not the key itself, just the text in it)

6.    Now you can create the file type as described above