Blank screens & Windows 7: Presenter & Quizmaker '09

Good evening, all -

I apologize in advance for the length of my post.

We've tried very diligently to troubleshoot this issue that has started to plague some of our learners. When they launch an Articulate course through our LMS (SumTotal/Pathlore), they get a blank screen. No navigational controls, no content... just the blank screen. The browser status message at the bottom of the screen reads "Done", so we know that more content is not going to load. This happens when they try to launch a course through Presenter 09 or a stand-alone quiz created in Quizmaker 09.

All of these users have been migrated to Windows 7; some are on 32-bit and others are on 64-bit. 

Here are some things that we have discovered/tried:

• Other Flash-based content deployed through our LMS plays correctly on the same machines for these users. It's just the Articulate-based courses that can't be launched.
• Just to be on the safe side, we've updated the Flash player for these users. It didn't make a difference.
• We have tried uninstalling and reinstalling Internet Explorer (we're all using IE8).
• We have tried clearing out the browser cache.

Our learner audience includes not only ~2000 corporate users, but also 25,000+ employees in various parts of the country in our stores. Our retail-based learners cannot make any system changes; the machines are locked down. Fortunately, they have not reported this issue.

For these corporate users, we've had only a handful of options to offer them:

• Using a nearby computer or logging into a loaner laptop (fortunately, our loaner laptop works fine with Articulate-based contnet).
• Using our company's remote login application (through Citrix) and accessing an alternate instance of IE 8; this always tends to work, though it's not a solution all corporate users can take advantage of.

There has to be some kind of setting that these corporate users have loaded (or perhaps not loaded) on their machines that is causing the content not to load properly. Reimaging their machines seems like such a brutal alternative, so we've been hesitant to suggest that. Are there any suggestions as to something else we can try?

Thank you in advance!

Scott Lindsey
Sr. Instructional Designer

RadioShack Corporation