I have spent the last couple of hours troubleshooting an issue and wanted to share some findings for others in case they run into the same problem. Scenario Users running Windows 7 RC1 (7057 as of this writing) (and potentially users running Internet Explorer 8 on earlier versions of Windows) are not able to be successfully authenticated for folders protected with .htpasswd (basic auth) protection. For me this created an issue with my podcasts which are protected using Basic Auth for compatibility with iTunes. They will be prompted for user id and password and, despite entering it correctly, it will not work. This does not happen to all of the users, which made it tough to troubleshoot. Workaround What seems to be a workaround is checking the "remember password" checkbox. The user is then able to successfully authenticate. I have been able to reproduce this on a number of my sites, and locally in XAMPP. Conclusion This most certainly appears to be an issue with either Windows 7 and/or IE 8 (if anyone has the final version of IE installed AND has > 250 members in their database AND is using basic auth protection.. see if you can reproduce the issue).
One thing maybe to try is to toally and I mean all of it .. remove all cookies, cache, history etc reboot and see if it goes away. I had an issue like this and it was that the local store had become confused. Thought it was fixed, ewe know windoze.
Totally. This, as it turns out, is a confirmed bug in Windows 7 build 7057. Hopefully it will not be wide spread as it creates a bit of confusion.