While laboring to produce the first Beta for Windows 7, Microsoft has dealt with issues that have survived past pre-Beta Build 6801. An illustrative example in this regard is associated with the Web Services application programming interface. The software giant revealed that automatic proxy settings retrieval tasks in Windows 7 pre-Beta build 6801 could fail when the Web Services API was involved. Moving forward to the next development milestone of Windows 7, the Redmond company has resolved the problem.

“When using Web Services API on Windows 7 Pre-Beta build 6801.0, you may get the following error in: Failure errorCode=0x803d0015 - Failed to retrieve the automatic proxy settings. The proxy could not process the request,” Nikola Dudar, program manager Visual C++ Team, revealed.

Microsoft delivered Build 6801 of the next iteration of Windows 7 at the Professional Developer Conference 2008 and the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference 2008 at the end of October, namely in early November. The company subsequently indicated that Windows 7 Beta would be made available at the start of 2009. “The root cause of the issue has already been fixed in the Beta builds of Web Services API. It should work just fine with Windows 7 Beta once it is available,” Dudar promised.

For the time being, Microsoft has not delivered a fix for the automatic proxy settings retrieval failures, but a workaround can be used as a temporary solution. Dudar added that “There is a workaround to the issue. Here is what you have to do: open Internet Options from Tools menu in the Internet Explorer; switch to Tab Connections, and click on the button LAN settings; on the dialog that IE should open for you; uncheck 'Automatically detect settings;' uncheck 'Use automatic configuration script.' If you have a proxy server setup on the LAN, check 'Use a proxy server for your LAN,' and manually specify address and port of this server.”