Knowledge Base

The application UI opening slowly when there is no internet access

Category: Troubleshooting & error messages
Date: 22 Feb 2011
Product: all products
When running the application UI, it may take a very long time to open, especially when the machine has no internet access.

It is possibly related to assemblies with Authenticode signatures. The executable is signed with a certificate which tries to validate itself via the Internet. It tries to contact the Certificate Authority to check the certificate revocation list (CRL) which, in the case of Red Gate software is crl.thawte.com. This is probably in most cases not possible due to closed net or firewalls. If an application has multiple assemblies (or DLLs) which are code signed as well, the timeout applies to each. This is an OS automated process to check the validity of the certificate.

It can be solved by adding the following lines to the machine.config of the .Net Framework 2.0 but beware this is a global setting:

<runtime>
     <generatepublisherevidence enabled="false"/>
</runtime>

If this is unacceptable, another workaround is to add an entry to the local hosts file:

'127.0.0.1 crl.<certificate_authority>.com'