Repeated ERROR_INTERNET_SECURITY_CHANNEL_ERROR from HttpSendRequestEx

[Matt Fletcher]

We are working on plug-ins for Outlook and Outlook Express which make both
HTTPS and HTTP calls. We have an intermittent problem under Windows 98
calling HTTPS sites - we repeatedly get an error of
ERROR_INTERNET_SECURITY_CHANNEL_ERROR returned by HttpSendRequestEx. This
problem can be reproduced (after a number of attempts) by breaking the
connection while sending or receiving. InternetOpen is called before every
connection, and InternetCloseHandle is called after every connection. At
present, the problem can only be resolved by restarting the mail client.

Is there any way of clearing any cached certificates etc to resolve this
problem? If it were a standalone app rather than a plug-in, we could unload
and reload wininet.dll.

Thanks in advance for any help.
Matt Fletcher

[Radjm]

Matt,

I was getting the same error message for my application and reload of the
wininet.dll did not help.
After I added the site to the trusted sites in Security settings of IE
options it started to work.
It seems that the setting
"Don't prompt if no certificate is found or only one certificate is found"
for a zone must be set to avoid the problem.
Crazy, hah?

Let me know if it helped you as well,
Radim Krampol

[Radjm]