PeopleSoft in Internet Explorer: Fix for “Invisible” Pop-Up Messages

In Internet Explorer version 9, when it is set to the wrong mode, some pop-up messages (ones generated using MessageBox, Winmessage with the “,0” parameter set, etc.) do not display.  Instead they float invisibly over the upper left corner of the page, making anything on that portion of the page unclickable.  I'll show you how I fixed that.

 I discovered the invisible message in the upper left corner of the page by hovering my mouse over that area.  In the portion of that area where the OK button should be, the mouse pointer changes from an arrow object to a hand object, and if you’re careful you can get the hint “OK [Enter]” to show up on the screen.

To get these “invisible” pop-up messages to display correctly, I set the Browser Mode to “IE9” (which was necessary in order for some special styling on our custom pages to display correctly) and the Document Mode to “IE8 Standards” (circled in yellow in the image below).

This will cause your web browser to be refreshed, so you may have to navigate back to the page you were on to test whether the message now displays correctly.

Click on the image above to see a larger version.

Special thanks to Dan Moran for suggestions on how to approach this problem.