Sitecore timeout on login

Question

Working with sitecore on my local machine. When I attempt to log into "desktop", it hangs at /sitecore/shell/default.aspx?sc_lang=en and eventually times out. It works fine if I log into "content editor" Any ideas how to debug this?

Answer 1

I had exactly the same problem once. The solution was to move the Data directory to a different location (with its whole content). I have no idea why it behave like that.

What's even stranger, once it starts working, you can move the folder back and it will behave as it should.

Answer 2

We had this problem yesterday. We found this question on Stack Overflow and tried moving the data folder from the website folder into a separate folder. This solved the problem immediately. You then need to change this setting in the Sitecore.config (or Web.config) file:

<sc.variable name="dataFolder" value="/Data"/>

to point at the new folder. We have asked Sitecore support whether this is a known issue and they didn't have many ideas. Their only guess was that it could have been caused by Sitecore caching.