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For the past 2 weeks or so, my wife has been complaining that when using Safari 5.1.5 on her 24” iMac C2D, she frequently encounters a generic Apple dialog (not a 404 dialog) that says: “Safari Can’t connect to the server. Safari can’t open page XXX because Safari can’t connect to the server XXX”.

At first I thought it was Operator Error or merely an unfriendly Safari site, and suggested she try FireFox. That always worked as designed.

But then today, while using Safari onher machine, I was unable to access https://extensions.apple.com/ with the alert dialog as above. So then I tried that same site on my computer and had no problems.

So far I have Repaired Permissions, Relaunched Finder, ran DiskWarrior v4.4, and restarted-- all to no avail.

A most vexing problem (for moi and Mrs. Moi). Your thoughts and suggestions most welcome (and appreciated).

Clear the Safari caches.......

I cleared the caches (twice) and then quit, and restarted Safari. Alas, still no joy.

Have you tried shutting down and rebooting into Safe Mode to see what happens?

Also, have you tried a test user account?

Does your wife run Little Snitch 2.5 by any chance?

If there's an issue with LS 2.5 that affects Safari 5.1.5, I'm not experiencing it.

Bingo!

Somehow, LittleSnitch had established a rule to: "deny TCP connections to port 443 (HTTPS)."

Once that was resolved, sweetness and light returned to the realm.

Always and again, my thanks!

Glad to hear you got things sorted out. Your error message reminded me of Little Snitch's responses, hence my suggestion. It's real easy to hit the wrong button when LS asks you how to proceed, and quite often a particular decision will bite you some time after you made it, consciously or not. One can only hope you hit the 'temporary' button in these errant cases, to gain another chance after you restart your Mac. Otherwise it means a trip into LS's bowels.

But in addition to this, I've noticed a marked increase of such 'access denied' occurrences with Little Snitch version 2.5. I strongly suspect a bug, because this frequently happens early after startup before any LS permission query has been presented. Obviously, a bug explanation 'requires' the absence of any rules I myself allowed or let slip through, and that's hard to prove without copying the rule list after every (restart) session, and comparing it with the one after a new access issue occurs and the list of current session decisions.

Good troubleshooting!

Thanks for the clarification.

I suspect the Deny Rule became enabled in error. But I cannot envision what prompted my wife to do such. And thus, 'twas a matter of mis-clicking, e.g., denying rather than allowing. Still, shame on moi for not remembering to check LS.

Had that happened on my machine, I would have attributed the cause to too much cooking sherry.

I'm wondering whether your wife is perhaps "Allowing Until Quit" in instances in which "Allowing Forever" would both be more appropriate and save her from much laborious clicking?

Edit: Correction... Y'know, it seems like she must have been clicking on "Deny Forever," otherwise her issues wouldn't have been continual.

Sorry for the crossed wire.