MobileMe – Getting WebDav (iDisk) support working on XP

No matter what I tried, I couldn’t get my XP machines to mount an iDisk using the WebDav protocol per Apple’s directions:

Connecting to your iDisk from Windows Explorer

1. Click the Start menu and choose Network Connections > My Network Places.
2. In the window that opens, click "Add a network place" to open the Add Network Place wizard.
3. On the next screen, click "Choose another network location."
4. When prompted for the URL for your iDisk, type the following URL address (replace "YourMemberName" with your own member name):
   http://idisk.me.com/YourMemberName/

I thought the problem was that my user name had a dot ‘.’ in the middle of it. MobileMe usernames become webdav directories.

Wrong. Google (praise be) gave me the fix …

I'm not sure if this is the right place to post this but I found a solution to my problems with XP and Apache2 here: http://blog.pclark.net/2005/03/fun-with-windows-xp-and-webdav.html...

The secret is to add a port number to the URL - for instance, use:
http://my.site.com:80/mydirectory
rather than
http://my.site.com/mydirectory.

When you do this, you'll get the AuthName from your httpd.conf file in the authentication window above the username and password fields, and the username and password should work, without having to have my.site.com\ prepended to the username…

So I tried http://idisk.me.com:80/first.lastname/ (actually, I forgot the terminal ‘/’ but it worked first try. I just had to enter my username and password, telling XP to remember the password.

I suspect this is actually an XP bug. There’s something familiar with it, it wouldn’t surprise me to learn I’ve had to do this before (yep, I solved this one a year ago with DreamHost, it’s known as the /# hack!)

See also

• Gordon's Tech- The MobileMe Massacre begins
• Gordon's Tech- WebDAV, Microsoft, DreamHost and the insane slash and pound hack
• MobileMe- Perspective of a crusty Palm veteran – in which I ran into a similar iDisk problem in July 2008

Update 10/21/09: I tried this on another XP SP2 machine and all I had to do was enter http://idisk.me.com/YourMemberName/ with the trailing forward slash (per directions). I don't know what's really going on here. If you're having problems first try the forward slash, next try entering the port.

Update 10/23/09: An Apple Discussion contributer pointed out that Apple's kb article recommends installation of a May 2007 Microsoft "web folder" update:

• description: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/907306
• download: Software Update for Web Folders (KB907306)

I can't tell if this was ever included in any XP service packs, I don't think Microsoft always includes all of their fixes.