I'm using Tcl Tcom implementation to automate login operation to some
secured sites (but problem should be the same with VB).  It works very
well but it looks like when you open two sessions using the
InternetExplorer COM object, you can only browse the last one and the
first one will report a session expired-like error.

It looks actually that there's only one session variable shared by all
the IE instances you can launch using COM.  It's quite odd because if
you launch IE manually it works well.

1st part of the question is: could you give me the complete technical
explanation for that.

2nd part of the question is: please help me to find a workaround.

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Clarification of Question by alphavii-ga on 30 Jun 2003 02:46 PDT

I would accept as an answer another way to launch IE and to automate
it (log in and click the ok button on the site) to login to multiple
secured sites simultaneously.

Using Tcl of course, but solutions for other languages might help.

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Clarification of Question by alphavii-ga on 03 Jul 2003 05:09 PDT

One of the root problem might be: how can you run two different IE
processes using com automation ?

IE probably stores per-session cookie details into a common memory
space.  You will also get the same session if you open a "new window"
from within IE.  But if you start ie manually as a new process, it
will get a new session id.

I am guessing that when you create two com objects, it's still using
the same process / process id.  If there's any way for you to create
the second in a different thread or process, this might solve your
problem.

If you do not need both browsers to be open, you can try calling
various 'exit' methods in the InternetExplorer object too, and then
create the second com instance.

Thanks for the comment, it's a lot of useful information.
However, the problem is that I need to be able to browse into both
windows.  Maybe we could investigate using threads / different
processes.

Launching twice the launcher runs twice the same IE session id...  I
wonder what I could try to do to generate a new process.