Sharepoint started erroring out and wouldn’t load today.  I had made a couple of changes to the server so I wasn’t sure which one had caused the problem.

After turning off custom errors so I could see the details, the error was: “Error: The browser or gateway element with ID ‘SKTDevicesSamSung’ cannot be found”

Right away I knew what did it but not sure why.  I was playing with interpreting the user agent strings that various browsers send to your server when they make requests.
I don’t really need to know what browser, version and OS is hitting our intranet but it was fun figuring out how to do it.  Well I had run the aspnet_registerbrowsers.exe -i command which loads info from .browser files to help with identifying web browsers.  There’s a bug that causes sharepoint to choke on the SKTDevicesSamSung element of the compat.browser xml file.

To fix it find these files (I had 2 because of 64bit Server 2008).
They were in my folders below:
c:\inetpub\wwwroot\wss\virtualdirectories\80\App_browsers\compat.browser
c:\inetpub\wwwroot\wss\virtualdirectories\16212\App_browsers\compat.browser

Following instructions from Microsoft had me delete the following lines from the compat.browser files:

<browser id=”InfrawareSamSung” parentID=”SKTDevicesSamSung”>
<browser id=”InfrawareLG” parentID=”SKTDevicesLG”>
<browser id=”InfrawareSKY” parentID=”SKTDevicesSKTT”>
<browser id=”InfrawareMotorola” parentID=”SKTDevicesMotorola”>

Remove these lines from the opening tag <browser…> including the line with </browser>.

After removing these lines I re-ran the aspnet_registerbrowsers.exe -i command (not sure if that’s necessary or not).
That fixed the issue.