“He’s a big pig. You can be a big pig, too.” ~Timon

Turns out that Flash isn’t the murderous killer with the 9-inch chef’s knife. It’s just a big pig. Flash, within this Scorm course, was passing Scorm data to an external JavaScript function. JS was opening an ActiveX XmlHttpRequest object to send the Scorm data to the service via a WebService call (think AJAX). However, Flash was requiring that this be a synchronous call (so much for AJAX). W3C regulates [Hypertext Transfer Protocol — HTTP/1.1 RFC 2616 Section 8.1.4] that “a single-user client should not maintain more than 2 connections with any server or proxy.” Flash is busy downloading external assets, so both connections were taken, and it then says “go and make a synchronous XML call.” XmlHttpRequest object doesn’t like making a synchronous call when there are no available connections to the server; it bugs out and the browser freezes.

Hopefully things will be better with Internet Explorer 7. It is slated to no longer use the ActiveX version of XmlHttpRequest object, but rather the XmlRequest object that Mozilla uses. Perhaps this one will handle itself a little better.