Charles Error Report: How to over come it?

Question

I have recently switched from mac development environment to windows development environment. I was used Chrles proxy extensively to capture network traffic, requests and response details. Right now I have installed Charles proxy version 3.7 in windows 8. How ever I have observed that the website on which I am working is not opening at all with Charles proxy ON. It is showing below exception message. And it is working perfectly for all other websites.

Charles Error Report

Failed to connect to remote host

Charles failed to connect to the remote host. Check that your Internet connection is ok and that the remote host is accessible. Maybe your network uses a proxy server to access the Internet? You can configure Charles to use an external proxy server in the External Proxy Settings.

The actual exception reported was:

java.net.ConnectException: Connection timed out: connect Charles Proxy, http://www.charlesproxy.com/

Research that I have done before coming to SE:

I have searched in google with the keyword "Charles Error Report-Failed to connect to remote host". I got couple of links which are related to the above issue.

First link says to check for external proxy setting. I have checked, there are no external proxy settings in my computer.
Second link says open the url in browser and close charles proxy and reopen it. I did that. Still no luck.

How to overcome this issue?

Answer 1

Do you get the same problem with other proxies like Fiddler? If so, it's probably not related to Charles but either a network problem or inability of your application to work with a proxy.

Other causes may be using HTTPS (which can cause certificate errors) or using the loopback address (localhost or 127.0.0.1) which may or may not be ignored by the proxy.

UPDATE

In IE10+ Enhanced Protection Mode prevents untrusted applications from accessing local resources. Pages and sites that are not in the Trusted Zone are considered unstrusted, so they can't connect to any local proxy. Fiddler includes a configuration button to configure Windows 8 to bypass this. You can find a very good explanation of what happens and why here.

In Windows 8, EPM is enabled only for Metro IE. In 8.1 it is enabled by default even for Desktop IE.

You may be able to make Charles work again simply by adding your site's address to the Trusted Zone in IE's security settings, or you can download the EnableLoopBackUtility mentioned in Configure Fiddler for Windows 8 Metro-style applications to allow IE to connect to your site through the local proxy