I think I know the answer to this question, but I'll go ahead and ask it anyway.

Our online store uses a java script which starts up our shopping cart
program when a visitor enters our site.

As an example, if you go to:

http://www.respree.com/artist/a.html ,

the java script reparses the page, so that the URL looks like

http://www.respree.com/cgi-bin/SoftCart.exe/artist/a.html?E+scstore

Here is where the potential problem is occuring.  The example page
above has links on it that 'depends' on the shopping cart being
running.  Clicking on the artist name links, kicks off the search
engine, which won't run unless the shopping program (SoftCart.exe) is
not running.  That's where the java script comes in which starts the
shopping cart program).

It seems to work perfectly when I've tested it manually.  However, my
traffic log analyzer says I'm getting a lot of 404's on this page and
have concluded that when spiders are indexing the page, it doesn't
understand (or won't process) the java script that kicks off the
shopping cart program, and in turn, results in the broken links and
its ability to further index the linked pages.

Looking to get other opinions on why this is happening and how to fix it.

Thanks for your help.

Hi Garrick,

Nope, spiders don't parse JavaScript.  Some will read it as plain
text, others will take one look, and turn around to run the other way.

I don't have a lot of time to investigate today (there's a 20 pound
turkey in need of brining to contend with), but perhaps these two
links will give you and the other Researchers something to start with:

Can Search Engine Spiders Crawl Your Site?
http://www.webdevinfo.com/articles.php?articleId=31&page=2

Do Spiders & bots read Javascript?
http://forums.devshed.com/t41632/s.html

--Missy

Hello,
many search engines don't parse javascript.
It appears that Google read some little bit of code, such as redirects.