I’ve been having an issue today with a cryptic (which seems to be the norm for Microsoft) error message. Well, actually it was just an error number:

-1072896658

I was in the midst of adding some minor AJAXified code to a corporate website. The test site works perfectly, however whenever accessing the javascript Object/member xmlHttp.responseText on the release site, I get that magical number of death.

Thankfully Pavan Keely had already done the research on this one – IE is wigging out due to Charset issues. Sure enough, the apache directive “AddDefaultCharset” was set to none. Fixing that, fixed this annoyance.