I recently installed SharePoint Server 2007 on my Windows 7 64 bit development machine, and after setting up my first Web App and Site Collection my test site would not load in Internet Explorer 8 or in SharePoint Designer 2007, although it would work fine in Firefox. Now the screen would load blank in IE8 after asking for authentication about 3 times. In SPD2007, it would ask for authentication seemingly endlessly until I just hit cancel, and it would never load the site.
At first, after asking and searching around, I thought that the loopback issue with IE8 may have been causing the problem, but even after double checking everything in that area I still had the same issue. Also, I wasn’t getting the 401.1 screen, as is usually the case with the loopback issue. If you are having that problem, then you should check out this post.
Finally, a colleague of mine, Phillip Wilkins, told me that he fixed the blank screen issue by enabling Windows Authentication in IIS. That fixed it! Thanks, Phillip.
Here are some quick instructions with screenshots to show you what I did:
- Open IIS Manager (I do this: Click Start, type "iis," and then click enter).
- Click on Authentication under the IIS section.
- If Windows Authentication is Disabled, then click on it and then click on Enable under the Actions menu on the right. You should now see that Windows Auth is enabled, and hopefully this has fixed your problem.