SharePoint Authentication: FireFoxs works but IE doesn’t

I was having a great deal of pain on a new SharePoint development server recently. Environment = Windows 2008, IE7.

Situation

1. Create a SharePoint web application with a host header on port 80. Create a site collection
2. Update host file (or DNS) with new host header entry
3. In IE make sure the web application is in the Intranet Zone
4. Open up browser in IE navigate to site using host header and the authentication dialog login is displayed.
5. Enter my credentials 3 times and receive a 401.1 and an entry in the Security Event log
6. If I open FireFox and browse to the web site the authentication dialog is displayed
7. I enter my credentials and I can log in fine
   Note: To get rid of the authentication prompt in FireFox
1. Open FireFox and in the address type about:config
2. Find the entry network.automatic-ntlm-auth.trusted-uris
3. Set the Key’s value to a comma seperated list of trusted URIs i.e your host header
8. So FireFox is fine but IE is having issues

 

Solution

I finally stumbled across a blog article from Brian Farnhill and Ishai Sagi that lead me to the solution.

You receive error 401.1 when you browse a Web site that uses Integrated Authentication and is hosted on IIS 5.1 or IIS 6
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/896861

In my case I am using IE 7 and while the Solution/Workaround discusses two separate methods and states that method one is preferred, I could only fix my issue upon completing method 2