Menus not displaying in IE 7

I have several websites with menus created in both MenuMaker and Webstyle 4. In the last few days something very odd has happened, certain of those websites no longer display the menu in IE7.

The ones affected all have a Flash object which displays at the top of the page. The menu displays fine in Firefox but not in IE7.

If I remove the Flash object on the affected websites, the menu returns. Also if I move the Xara code so that it appears before the code for the Flash, the menu also returns.

I have no idea what is causing this. Is it an update to IE7 perhaps? Bear in mind that these websites have displayed perfectly for several years and have not been modified recently.

I would be most grateful for any ideas or solutions. It is driving me nuts!!

Hi Robolovsky,

This is a repeat of the answer to your post in the Webstyle forum.

Could you provide a link to the websites that are having the problem?

Have you recently updated your flash player plugin for IE7 to Adobe's Flash Player version 10? There have been some discussions about problems with security changes in the new flash player.

See the thread http://www.talkgraphics.com/showthread.php?t=35004 for some details about the changes and how it effects some web hosts.

Hi Bill

Many thanks for the reply. I have now solved the issue but it took a great deal of trial and error. Hopefully this might assist others who have had problems.

It was indeed the new Flashplayer 10 in IE 7 that was to blame. I remember being asked if I wanted to update when I was using Firefox and assume that the download updated the plugins in both browsers.

While the update worked just fine in Firefox the issue was with IE 7 where, for some unknown reason, it caused the browser to malfunction when trying to display Webstyle or Menumaker menus. The error messages were along the lines of "Unspecified Error, Line 3 character 50" which of course could not be possible as Line 3 in most HTML pages is just a <Title> tag or similar.

Initially I twiddled with the code and found that it would display the menus if I placed the Javascript calls before the Flash code. However this is not always convenient. Curiously it would also display the menus if I removed the Object Classid tag from the Flash code.

I performed several reinstalls of the of the plugin but the behaviour remained. I then went to this page on the Adobe website: www.adobe.com/go/getflashplayer which I believe carried out a full install of the player as opposed to a plugin update. It was this that finally solved the problem although, rather annoyingly, it also installed the Google Toolbar without asking me.

So it's business as usual finally but what a weird problem. There were never any issues with the display of Flash objects just the Xara menus. Even Javascript calls to other remote files were dealt with normally.

My advice to any one still having problems would be to try the stand alone Flashplayer installer. It worked for me.