When you download dynamic content that is generated through ASP pages or through a Common Gateway Interface (CGI), Internet Explorer may stop responding (hang) for up to five minutes, and you may receive the following error message:

Back to the top

This behavior occurs because Internet Explorer is limited to two open connections in HTTP 1.1. If an application thread starts to download two content pages and then starts a synchronous download of an object, Wininet.dll tries to obtain a socket for this third download request. However, WinInet.dll has already hit the connection limit because of the previous requests. Therefore, WinInet.dll blocks the application thread with a call to the WaitforSingleObject function. Meanwhile, the first content page is downloaded by using one of the first two download requests and tries to indicate a completion status. However, the application thread is blocked in WaitforSingleObject. The thread resumes after 5 minutes and finishes its execution. The synchronous download request is canceled because it could not obtain a socket during the WaitForSingleObject call. Because the object was not downloaded, the content of the Web page may not appear as the author intended.

Back to the top

To work around this issue on the client computer, you can modify the registry to increase the connection limit. For more information about how to change the connection limits, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

Back to the top

Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed in the "Applies to" section.

Back to the top