by Dan Olivares
20. January 2010 02:33
Lately, I've been getting a lot of reports of being unable to log into various websites.
Most people, however, don't have an issue. Just a few.
So, I set out to locate the common element here.
It turns out that some browsers occasionally get errors in the index of cookies that cause them not to expire from the cookie folder but, when the browser reads the cookie from the cookie store, it immediately expires them and doesn't send them back to the server. Unfortunately, it also doesn't get rid of the cookie in the cookie store! This 'state' of cookie doesn't allow the browser to accept a new cookie from the server. This presents itself to users in the inability to log-in to a website or a website's inability to remember the user if they've checked 'remember me'.
You might think that simply clearing cookies would solve the issue. In some cases, it does. In some cases, it doesn't.
When clearing cookies fails to resolve the problem, there's a workaround for Internet Explorer, the user needs to open an Explorer window to the user profile directory on their computer. Commonly (on windows XP) , this is C:\Documents And Settings\YourUsername. From there, go to the 'Cookies' folder/Directory. Delete all of the items in there except Desktop.ini and Index.dat.
There's also a workaround for FireFox:
Tools > Options > Advanced > Network > Offline Storage (Cache): "Clear Now"
Tools > Options > Privacy > Cookies: "Show Cookies"
It's also possible that the file cookies.sqlite that stores the cookies is corrupted.
You can try to rename or delete cookies.sqlite and cookies.txt in your Profile Folder.
See http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_folder_-_Firefox for more information about how to find the profile folder on your computer
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