WebNavigator Crashes

Dear All,

I have a WinCC Server V7.3+upd1 running with WebNavigator v7.3 (5 Clients) in Windows 7 pro SP1 64bit. The Windows installation is a Virtual Machine running on an ESXi platform and the specs of the VM are a XEON E5530 CPU and 8GB RAM. All worked well for months until the WebNavigator start crashing with a specific pattern.

After server startup, an internet explorer (v11) was launched in the server machine (and clients IE v9). It all starts well and the user can navigate from the main page to a certain page called “gate out” with no problem. If from there the user goes to another set of pages called “Lane 1”, “Lane 2”, “Lane 3”, “Lane 4” then the WebNavigator Crashes. If the user goes to another page (not “Gate out”) then WebNavigator does not crash. Sometimes the same happens when the user tries to go from the “Gate out” page to any of the “Lane 1”, “Lane 2”, “Lane 3”, “Lane 4” pages. When the WebNavigator crashes, the there is a grey screen displayed indefinitely. If the user closes Internet explorer and then opens it again then most of the times the page freezes to the “Connecting to server” message. Sometimes it starts ok but then it crashes again.

It may be worth to mention that at some times the Clients showed the following error message: “Control Surrogate has stopped working”

There was no apparent reason for this to happen as the project was running ok for months. There was No Windows update, No Internet explorer update, No settings change. It just started to happen.

The following steps were taken in order to resolve the issue, but without success:

A backup project was used but the same behavior occurred.
The Web configurator and the Web publisher were run with the necessary restarts.
The WinCCViewerRT was used but it also crashed in the same manner as the IE.
The content of the WebNavigator folder in the project path was deleted and Web configurator and the Web publisher were run with the necessary restarts.

EDIT:
I also noticed that the problem exists only if there is a connection to the controllers which are 7 x ET200Sp PLCs 1510.

Regards

Thank you Siemens for the pain and grief.

The following script run well on the runtime but caused the Webnavigator to crash.

char *str;
str = SysMalloc(16);

sprintf(str, "Fault Code: %02x", GetTagWord("WB4_TRCV_Status"));

return str;

Btw when I run the Web publisher, it did not complain that the script has an issue.

Regards