blank TOC, blank index, DHTML drop-downs don't work

[Guest]

Good morning,

A colleague of mine just started to use DHTML drop downs in several topics in her RoboHelp HTML projects (RH X5). Unfortunately, when she went to build the WebHelp output, the TOC and Index both come up blank and the drop-downs don't work.

We've been trying to figure out what needs to be fixed - under her IE Internet Options - Advanced - Security, we checked "Allow active content to run in files on My Computer" and kept the other "active content" option unchecked. She could see her DHTML stuff, but not the TOC. When both "active" options were selected, she could see the TOC, but not the DHTML. On three other PCs in the department, both "active" options are selected and everything works fine, so I'm kind of leaning toward a PC issue, not RoboHelp.

We have a customized skin linked to all of our WebHelp projects here and that seems to work fine for her output.

She experienced a problem several months ago with the TOC coming up "blank", our support people tried to reinstall RoboHelp, they couldn't, so they reimaged her PC (nice, huh?), then installed RH.

Another thing I noticed in her IE Internet Options | Programs | Manage Add Ons - she has different Add Ons than I have. Are there any that she might have that cause conflicts with RH or are there required Add Ons that she must have?

Thanks,
Jim

[Peter Grainge]

Does the yellow information bar appear? It shouldn't with the option you selected but that doesn't mean is does not appear.

Is she generating to her hard disk?

If the same output is transferred to your PC, does it work then? (That's not the same as stuff you have generated working OK).

It should all work with IE out of the box and no need for any add-ons. I haven't seen any posts about add-ons causing a problem.

[Guest · Accepted solution]

I think we finally figured this one out. Another colleague of mine with a lot more knowledge about IE, Java, and applications in general determined that it was ultimately a problem with IE, possibly a corrupt install or something that was preventing the TOC from not working correctly - we actually got a "General Exception Error" when we tried to view the WebHelp output.

After a few hours of troubleshooting, he figured out that there seemed to be a problem with our IE installation. He originally thought it might have been related to a corrupt Java installation, but that didn't seem to be the case. Since we couldn't go any further and since our support organization was stumped as to how to fix the issue quickly (and they just don't seem to have the depth of knowledge we require), she (the colleague with the problem) ultimately gave the go ahead to our support team to have her machine reimaged (second time in a year) and have all of her software reinstalled, including RoboHelp X5. This time, I'm going to try to stay in the loop whenever they make any other changes to her PC that might affect RoboHelp.

By the way, we're running XP Professional Service Pack 2 with IE 6.

Thanks,
Jim