Needing to combine *iehta and *iexploreproxy in order to get Selenium Grid to work

Recently I've been trying to adapt Selenium 1 test cases designed to work in Firefox on Linux to Internet Explorer on Windows Vista. I installed the non-Grid version of Selenium on the Windows Vista box in order to test it, and found that while the "*iexplore" and "*iehta" launchers failed to work. "*iehta" and "*iexplore" both seem to enter an infinite loop when their .start() commands are run, with the .start() function never returning. Both also open up an Internet Explorer window leading to a location on the localhost's computer in C:/Users/($the current user's account)/AppData/Local/Temp that appears to be a blank page corresponding to an IE profile of some sort.

"*iexploreproxy" worked just fine on a standalone selenium server and remote control both run on the same machine. However, when trying to connect to the continuous-integration Linux hub on Selenium Grid, "*iexploreproxy" no longer worked. When run on Selenium Grid, "*iexplore" opens (and then immediately closes) an IE window, presumably the Selenium remote control. "*iehta" opens a Selenium remote control, but never returns the session ID to the hub, allowing the hub to start transmitting Selenese commands, causing the same behavior开发者_如何学运维 that was experienced on the standalone Selenium server.

However, if "*iehta" is manually halted (like by opening a python terminal on the same machine as the hub, requesting an instance of Selenium running "*iehta" called "sel" from the hub, running sel.start(), then hitting control-C during the resulting infinite loop, if another remote control for the grid has "*iexploreproxy" available, the hub can then run instances of Selenium on "*iexploreproxy" that are usable for testing purposes. Some strange discrepancies I've noticed are that on "*iexploreproxy", multiple consecutive instances of Selenium appear to share cookies and Basic HTTP Authentication login data between them (on Firefox I need to retype these passwords with each running of Selenium), and attempts to access domains outside the one "*iehta" was originally assigned to fail (IE, if I requested that "*iehta" start a browser in http://development.place.com, attempting to start another browser in http://stagingarea.place.com would result in Selenium failing.) Similarly, Internet Explorer windows are not closed when selenium.stop() is run, whereas all Firefox windows close under that circumstance. As near as I can tell, *iehta is creating an Internet Explorer profile that *iexploreproxy then uses.

Does anyone who is more familiar with Selenium on IE than me, or has knowledge about the inner workings of *iehta, know how to consolidate the *iehta call and the *iexploreproxy call so this fragile workaround does not have to be employed? The fact that I don't fully understand it means that all my tests have to be run manually, something I'd rather avoid so I can get back to working on new features.

Start your command prompt in admin mode and then run the selenium jar in that command prompt. That should fix the issue.