There is a problem with IE and PHP applications is certain instances where an intermittent blank page appears instead of the expected content.

This seems to relate to an earlier bug reported by Microsoft with IE 6 where the content length was reported as 0 during POST requests. This occured when browsing sites running UNIX/Apache with keepalive enabled. However, I’ve discovered that the same problem occurs intermittently with certain PHP applications and GET requests.

One workaround which solves the problem (although with a performance hit) is to create an .htaccess file in the root directory with the following setting:

[code]
BrowserMatch “MSIE” nokeepalive downgrade-1.0 force-response-1.0

SetEnvIf User-Agent “.*MSIE.*” \
nokeepalive ssl-unclean-shutdown \
downgrade-1.0 force-response-1.0
[/code]

This workaround disables keepalive for all IE 6 clients. I imagine this would have a negative performance effect, however it is likely preferable to a buggy application.

I haven’t been able to determine if certain PHP code techniques could be causing the problem. I read certain people presuming that it could be session related, however, i went as far as removing all session functionality from an application, however it did not solve the problem.