I have been asked to track down a discrepancy in the way a couple of machines we support show encryption certificates and am at a bit of a loss.
We have two machines on separate networks that are both accessing the same https site. When they connect they each receive a message that the certificate was not issued by a trusted certificate authority. When they click on the “go to the site anyway” link they get there with no problem. I understand why this happens and everything is OK so far.
From the site they can click on the “Certification Error” icon and then “View Certificates” to get to the certificate viewing tool. To this point both systems operate identically. However, when they click on the “Certification Path” tab, one sees the entire certification path but the other sees only the certificate for the current page.
This is significant because the users want to download (save to file) just the root certificate and add it to their “Trusted Root Certification Authorities” store. One of them can do this and the other cannot. If this was for just one site it would not be a problem, one could download the cert and email it to the other. But this is a function that both end users require and I can’t find any reason that one can do it and the other cannot and can’t find any setting that might control this.
The machines are substantially identical, the same model DELLs running XP SP2 and IE7 7.0.5730.11.
Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
~Greg