I have a web service that uses the MSN search web service. When its called by a client using the SOAP toolkit, after about 10 calls, the try/catch block around the MSN search call within my web service starts to catch this error: Client found response content of type '', but expected 'text/xml', which is returned to the web service's client. That error is repeated on several calls, and then it eventually goes away, and then may come and go after that.

I have a search page that uses the MSN search API that doesn't get this error. But that's only used by web browsers.

Anyone know any reasons for this error?

I read somewhere that this message might mean that the MSN search recieved some text or HTML error message, or some other bad response data, and not real SOAP formatted data (text/xml), and so it returns this error. But I don't really have a way, or know of a way to put an analyzer between my web server and whereever MSN connects to to see what's really coming back.

Seems like this error is due to MSN being over loaded with requests. So I put in retries with a timed wait between. Even then, lots of retries are done.

Also, must have retries on getting cached pages. Many times, you get a page back saying the page couldn't be found in the cache, but its there. You can duplicate that problem just using a web browser getting a cache page.

So the web service doesn't seem to have enough resources behind it.

After getting and compiling the new interface that corresponds to the latest SDK (0.6), now there are fewer errors.

But occasionally, still get 503 - service not available.