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CactuShop doesn't work on my Windows XP installation

Item: #96
Date: 10 Dec 2001
Applies to
v3
v4
v5

Question

I have Windows XP and now CactuShop does not appear to work. What can I do to fix this?

Answer

Firstly, only XP Pro supports IIS, the Microsoft web server. Since CactuShop must run on an IIS web server, CactuShop will not work if you upgrade to XP Home version from a previous Windows version running PWS or IIS.

There are some hacks that can get IIS to run on the XP Home version - you can find these easily on search engines but we would not advise them for those without extensive experience of editing the registry and other such geeky activities.

With regard to CactuShop appearing dead on XP Pro where IIS is installed, there are two possible explanations and both relate to the FSO (file scripting object).

Unlike most ASP applications, the front end of CactuShop uses 'skins'. As part of the skinning process, the FSO reads the skin template file and formats the page dynamically. If CactuShop appears dead on your XP machine, type the path to the back end and you will likely find that this works fine. This is because the back end is not skinned.

There are two reasons we've encountered as to why this happens. The first is that permissions for the FSO to read the skin file are not present. However, the most likely is that you are running Norton Antivirus and have 'script blocking' enabled.

This feature is designed to stop scripts acting maliciously but unfortunately interprets CactuShop's use of the FSO in the skinning code wrongly and blocks it.

To correct this problem, open up the Norton Antivirus applications and turn script blocking off. You may also need to reboot your machine after doing this for the changes to have any effect.

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