Or, how to really get rid of “THTTPRequestThread” errors

Warning – the method described below is a last resort solution and should be used only for demonstration and development purposes – NOT ON PRODUCTION! You should first attempt to use the troubleshooting technique described here by Ryan Farley.

If all else fails, and you are in a time crunch, and slxwebmm.dll JUST WON’T CONNECT, then you may be tempted to squash it completely using the following technique. This is something you can use to disable the mail merge functionality without also disabling the rest of the ActiveX related functionality (e.g. exporting groups to Excel).

1. Download and install ISAPI Rewrite. There is a free “lite” version which does enough.
2. Open the ISAPI rewrite manager you just installed, click on Edit and add the following 2 lines:

   RewriteEngine On
   RewriteRule /mmserver/slxwebmm.dll /mmserver/slxwebmm.ashx

3. Configure your /mmserver virtual directory to enable ASP.NET (it probably is already).
4. Download this zip file and extract it to your /mmserver virtual directory, wherever it may be located.

What this fake slxwebmm handler does is simply regurgitate a canned request I stole from a working server. Obviously it is not going to do mail merges for you But it will prevent the THTTPRequestThread errors and let you do other things like export to Excel.