Inconsistent display results for project -some see blank popup window, others having info missing from pop-up windows

[JHanson04]

I'm not an experienced RoboHelp user.  I provide general I.T. services to a small company with 5 employees.  They exclusively produce documentation using RoboHelp.

I say this to explain that I don't have any experience with using RoboHelp or generating documentation.  I'm just trying to help my client find a solution.

They are currently having an issue where compiled RoboHelp documentation does not displaying properly in Internet Explorer (and gives different results on different workstations).

User number 1 & 2 are on RoboHelp 11 and Internet Explorer 9.  These two are still on IE9 because they still have some RoboHelp 9 projects they have not converted over yet.  User 3 is on RoboHelp 11 and Internet Explorer 11.

For Users 1 and 2, one of these two users would compile the project.  When viewing in Internet Explorer, the main window would display properly.  When they open a hyperlink in the project, the resulting pop-up window would display empty.  If User 3 with IE11 viewed the project in her IE11, the popup window would display blank as well.

If User 3 re-compiles the same project, Users 1 & 2 still see a blank pop-up window.  If User 3 with IE11 viewed the project in her IE11, the popup window would display a lot of the info, but part of the text would be missing.

If User 1 or 2 makes changes to a project and re-compiles it, they get the same results as the above mentioned project.

They did not have this problem before.  Windows Updates are turned off, so there should not have been any updates to IE9 or IE11 to cause this.

Any ideas?

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

All the RH11 users should be updated to get the latest fixes for browser security updates – see Willam’s site wvanweelden.eu for a list of all the patches.

[JHanson04]

I need some clarification.  Do you mean update the Internet Explorer security updates or update RoboHelp 11 itself.  The users are on 11.04.291, which is the latest patch.

William's site mentions that the last patches include previous hotfixes. There is a hotfix titled "WebHelp fix for Internet Explorer" which sounds like it may help with the issue, but it is from February 2014, before even Patch 11.01 was released.  I downloaded the files and looked at the dates - they are from 2014, where the present files of the same name installed on the system are from 2015.  As a result I did not change to these 2014 files since I assume this issue was fixed in subsequent patch releases.

Thoughts?

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

RH11 was patched to deal with browser security tightening (not just IE). Try compiling one of the sample projects to see if they exhibit the same problems; if they don’t then the issue must be in the project. If they do, then it sounds like you’re missing a hotfix.

[JHanson04]

Here's some more info I found about the way users work on projects.  They have roughly 50 projects they work on and update each year.  These projects are saved to a separate data folder on their file server.  Their standard practice is to copy the data folder from the server down to their workstation.  They ten make the updates locally, compile it, then move the completed project back to the file server.  This is the process they were recommended to use by Adobe support previously.

What the user tested after your response was this:  They copied the data file back to the server, before compiling it, then compiled the project while the data was on the server.  The resulting compiled project now displays correctly from all three systems.

But we are confused by something.  As mentioned in my previous post, we did earlier look at the "WebHelp fix for Internet Explorer" from February 2014.  It contains three files dated 2014 - whibody.htm, whpost.js and whutils.js.  I searched the data folder on the server for whpost.js and found that file exists in most, if not all, of the 50 project folders.  It is dated in 2015 with what looks like dates that the projects were compiled.  When I searched the data folder for whutils.js, it is also in all of the 50 project folders, but is dated usually around 2010.

Since the three files for "WebHelp fix for Internet Explorer" hotfix are designed to be placed in the program executable folder on the C: drive, why are these files also showing up in the project folder data and is this related to our problem?

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

The JavaScript files that reside in the local installation of RH’s \Program Files\ folders act as a template for the creation of help outputs; when a project is compiled (i.e. help is generated), a copy of the files gets copied into the project’s \!SSL!\[output_format]\ folder.