A Web site I go to periodically for reference and other information is now prompting me to enter a username and password for a "Weblogic" server. This isn't something I have seen before and haven't gotten this prompt in the past. I am using Opera v9.26 as my browser of choice. How do I find out if the problem is with my browser or the Web site?
-- Glen

Being able to test with multiple browsers will be one of the ways you can test to see if it is a browser related issue or not. Ideally, testing with one computer with IE, another computer with Firefox and another with Opera. As a good control, these computers should have just Windows XP or whatever Desktop OS that are using with as little as possible other than the browser installed to reduce the number of variables.

However, you may not have the time or resources for this. This is how I setup a testing environment to duplicate your problem and identify. Using a Mac Mini I have in the lab, I installed Parallels Desktop for Mac (If you don't have a Mac available, you can also use Parallels workstation). I installed Windows XP as a guest operating system and got it fully patched. Once that was done, I started the XP Virtual Machine and tested network connectivity and internet access. I then created a snapshot of what I had just installed. This allowed me to create an additional snapshot under that to server as the IE browser test setup. I created additional sub snapshots under the base Windows XP that I started with. Each of the additional snapshots contained just one browser (Firefox, Opera, etc).

Once this platform was in place, I installed Wireshark in each machine snapshot to record the network activity and identify at a packet level if it was a configuration or browser compatibility issue to see where I needed to go next. To test your situation, I ran each snapshot (one at a time) with Wireshark running at the same time. I then compared each of the protocol captures to see where the problem was coming from. I did see the problem you talked about and got in contact with the Web folks responsible for the site. In testing I did following the report of the problem, it appears that the issue has been fixed as I no longer get the error.

Could you have done this all with one machine and just installed the three browsers on the same machine. Yes, but I was trying to establish a controlled testing method so that I wouldn't be fighting the problem not showing up because of one browser fixing the problem where another browser wouldn't show it because the environment was different than it would have been normally. Using desktop virtualization also lets you work with multiple desktop OSes without having to use multiple machines or having to set up multiple partitions on the same machine and boot between them to do the same testing.