I found it. And this is even worse then I thought. It turns out that when you install the Java runtime (JRE or JDK), it sets the default locale to the machine settings. At that time I had my machine on country=NL. So, that makes everything use NL as country. I thought maybe it was a Tomcat setting, but no. I change my country to UK and reinstalled Tomcat service, still NL as country. The only possible option to override it is via the -Duser.country=UK option. Yep, it doesn't take the language setting, just the country setting.
Now it also turns out that CFCOOKIE, or whatever in Tomcat is generating this, is setting the expires= value in the cookie, based on that country. So I have some nice examples: - expires=ma, 11-jun-12 18:19:18 GMT; just because dutch "june" goes to "jun" which is also good in english, Firefox & Chrome will recognize this as a valid expiry date and set it. IE9 goes one step further and checks the "ma" (=maandag in dutch, monday in english) and because I am having english IE9, it fails. Not recognized, so it brings the cookie back to expiry end-of-session. - expires=vr, 11-mei-12 18:15:12 GMT; here dutch "Mei" does not match "may", so invalid. Now IE, but also FF and Chrome will not recognize the cookie and default to end-of-session. - expires=Mon, 11-Jun-12 18:21:44 GMT; this is where I had country set to UK. And guess what happens, all browsers recognize it and deal with it properly. So this is not only an IE9 issue, Firefox & Chrome have it too, but they don't seem to check the day-of-week, where IE does. I can't believe this being so dependent on stupid country settings having to match on server and client side. Unbelievable. Luckily the abbreviation of months in dutch is the same in english for 9 out of 12 months. So this is a problem in FF + Chrome 25% of the year and in IE 100% of the year. Nice to know. Unfortunately, in other languages it is even worse. Can someone explain this dependency on country? Tomorrow I am going to find a collegae with dutch windows + IE. I am really curious to find out if this is also a problem the other way around (en-UK server, dutch client). Ivo -- online documentation: http://openbd.org/manual/ google+ hints/tips: https://plus.google.com/115990347459711259462 http://groups.google.com/group/openbd?hl=en
