Sharepoint List in Datasheet view locks or freezes Internet Explorer

I ran into an interesting issue in Share point 2007 last week that took me a few hours to solve and was not easy to debug. I couldn’t find any info on it anywhere so I thought this would be a good candidate for my first post to this blog.

One of my customers reported that when they tried to use the “Edit in Datasheet” view on any list in Share point 2007 their computer would lock. When I went to take a look at this I found IE was locked and it was consuming 50%+ processor time. I also noticed that our custom system master page which was the key to this problem.

After digging at the problem for an hour or so I found a class on the Div over the Content place holder (Placeholder-main) tag of the master page.

My custom style for the center content given below

.cContent
{
margin: 6px;
background-color:#FFFFFF;
min-height:600px;
Padding:2px 7px 7px 7px”
}

Suspecting that this might be part of the issue I removed this class from the div tag. This did fix the issue but now all my styles were gone. When I added the custom style back in the problem came back. Still suspecting the Padding in the class causing the issue.After removing padding style the Edit in Data sheet feature worked without a problem, and I still had my custom master page and styles.

So, if Edit in Data sheet isn’t working for you or it is causing excessive processor usage from IE, and you are using a custom master page, check for padding tags and remove them over the Content place Holder Main.