SharePoint 2010: Error opening Central Administration

So you’ve installed SharePoint 2010, everything seems to be working fine, site is configured and you are about to notify the client that they can start playing on that development environment.  After sending our all your notifications, the client requests a minor change and you quickly navigate to central administration only to find that it is not rendering and the “very scary” error message (with correlation id) is displayed.

Don’t Panic!

Let’s take a step back.  While I was installing SharePoint, I had to download a hot fix. To get it downloaded via the server I had to play with the script settings in IE.  I couldn’t get IE to download the hot fox and I had to install Firefox to get the hot fix downloaded.  (Gotta luv enhanced security settings).  In any event, I then completed the SharePoint installation and configured the server via Firefox.

The next time I tried to access Central Administration (now using IE8) it failed and gave me this monster error.  My heart did skip a beat, but then I realised that I had played with the script and security settings on Internet Explorer.  I quickly reverted to all the defaults and to my delight the site was once again accessible.

So what is the moral of this little story?  Firstly, plan VERY well before starting any SharePoint deployment.  Secondly, when you play with security and script settings, expect funny behaviour from SharePoint and don’t panic too much when IE does not render your site.  It is more often than not simply a client application issue.