msxml3.dll error '80090326' The message received was unexpected or badly formatted

Question

URL = "https://github.com/index.html"
Set xHttp = CreateObject("MSXML2.ServerXMLHTTP")
xHttp.Open "GET", URL, False
xHttp.setOption 2, 13056
xHttp.Send()

can anybody tell, why this code works on windows7, and does not work on windows XP

error

msxml3.dll error '80090326' `
The message received was unexpected or badly formatted.`

on xHttp.Send

Answer 1

I recently encountered a similar problem trying to retrieve a file via https onto a Windows 2003 server. Turned out the problem was that the set of SSL/TLS ciphers supported on the client-side was so old that none of them was supported on the server.

In my case, the server was behind an AWS ELB, which was doing the https negotiation. I was able to reconfigure the ELB to use an older cipher set (In the 'Listeners' tab, change the cipher config to use ELBSecurityPolicy-2015-05), and the client-side script magically started to work.

Answer 2

We had to install the following KB in a Windows 2003 server:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/948963

After this, another error:

msxml3.dll error '80072f7d'

An error occurred in the secure channel support

Thanks to this post (server giving msxml3.dll error '80072f7d' when trying to access secure url) installed the http://support.microsoft.com/kb/938397 and worked.

When aplying to production, only the first KB solved the problem.