The Data View Web Part is one of my favourite Web Parts. Its ability to integate data from legacy systems into the Sharepoint Look&Feel is great.
Some days ago, it was the source of some serious frustration. On the system with one of my clients we have a series of WSS 2.0 sites that use the DVWP to show several views on sharepoint lists and data from an external web service. Things were working great... until we deployed that system to a new environment and the site started prompting users for credentials. The prompt was not going away even you enter the correkt password. We tried several things like checking the account settings, resetting the password, checking and changing the WebServices´ authentication method back and forth, checking Sharepoint settings, resetting IIS and pulling our hair out. Even setting accounts to Administrators didn't help. Why? We compared the two systems. The new system was a fresh installation with all possible updates (including WSS SP3!).
After searching the web we found the following description at Microsoft:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/948919/en-usThere appears to be some serious issues with the DVWP after installing WSS SP3 (which comes down with Automatic updates... and
cannot be uninstalled). This one really hurts the credibility of SharePoint.
If you haven’t installed SP3 yet it’s probably worth waiting a while. If you have already installed it (and if you have automatic updates turned on you probably have), unfortunately there isn’t an uninstall option. The hotfix above is not freely available, you have to send a request to Mircosoft. Apply this hotfix only to systems that are experiencing this specific problem. This hotfix might receive additional testing. Therefore Microsoft recommends that you wait for the next software update that contains this hotfix.
We had no match for installing the hotfix. It fixed our problem and other side effects were not discoverd.
