I get the same results as you do.

Edit: Win 7 64bit, IE8

I hope that Kestral sees this. if it is not suppose to be flash dependent then it should be changed. if it is flash dependent then someone should say something instead of "no, it's not".

I also can not upload from IE8 with flash enabled???

I've never found a need to turn it off except for this test. Still,it's good info to have.

It's a jQuery plugin, if disabling flash in IE8 is disabling the control then maybe the bug is in IE. This may come as a surprise but IE is not what you'd call a "good" browser. If I disable scripting on the site using NoScript in FF the control goes away, no big surprise. However, if the control were flash based I would have to enable the movie every time I visit the site because I have flash disabled no matter what.

There is NO flash in the rating control. If you don't believe me download Firefox, download a plug-in called Firebug, right-click on the rating control and select Inspect Element. This will take you to the portion of the rendered HTML page that represents that rating control. It is all CSS and HTML wired together with some jQuery javascript.

*** Update:

OK, because I'm a dork that digs this sort of thing and because I could re-produce exactly what gmc2 had mentioned but I couldn't explain why, I did some digging and here's what I found:

When I disabled Flash in IE I noticed that the page said it finished rendering but there were problems, to be exact:

Webpage error details

User Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/4.0; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; Media Center PC 6.0; Creative AutoUpdate v1.40.01)
Timestamp: Wed, 5 May 2010 01:03:45 UTC


Message: 'undefined' is null or not an object
Line: 1
Char: 9047
Code: 0
URI: https://www.wincustomize.com/combres.axd/sExploreDetailsJS/-1765870801

Opening the specified URI in my handy dandy editor I noticed it was one *REALLLLLY* long line. So, going to character 9047 (or somewhere around there, I found this chunk of code.

function() {try{var i="0,0,0",g=navigator.plugins["Shockwave Flash"]||ActiveXObject;i=g.description||(function(){try{return(new g("ShockwaveFlash.ShockwaveFlash")).GetVariable("$version")}catch(j){}}())}catch(h){}i=i.match(/^[A-Za-z\s]*?(\d+)[\.|,](\d+)(?:\s+[d|r]|,)(\d+)/);return{available:i[1]>0,activeX

Without spending too much time trying to figure out exactly what it is doing it looks like some code that is attempting to determine whether flash is *available* in the current browser and something is undefined.

The reason the ratings plugin does not appear is because the error in this piece of javascript apparently causes jQuery to fail to initialize properly which seems to keep the onLoad event from firing or something along those lines. So, it would appear that the failure of the ratings control to appear when Flash is disabled is a side effect of another problem.

I now feel extra sure when I say there is no flash in this page.

HTH,

Kevin

I know it's frustrating but it's that chunk of javascript that I pasted that is causing the rating plugin to fail. It only involves flash insofar as it is checking to see if flash is available. It's just bad code that is causing a completely unrelated function to fail.

So a tad bit more digging and the strange resource Url that points to the problematic js code seems to be created by this lutility:

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/aspnet/combres.aspx

So -- it does seems to indicate that the misbehaving javascript code is more likely than not custom code created by the WC web team.

Has this been submitted in the bug thread?

yep, but I found that I needed to post it separately also to verify my sanity and slice of reality. thank you all for doing this, hope to return the favor someday.

now, I've been saying all along...

Kestral, so now is there anything that can be done to remedy this???