Windows Live Writer Connectivity Issue

I started using Windows Live Writer beta some time back for posting to my weblog and its been working nicely.  It connects to many of the different blogging systems, downloads the styles, lets you write in that style, preview it and post it.  One of the products from Microsoft which is really really fast to install, its not bloated with any extras, its free and super easy to use.

All of a sudden one day while trying to download the styles from my Word Press 2.x blog, I get this funny connectivity issue.

Windows Live Write can not connect to the blog. xmlrpc.php could not be accessed, ”406, Not Acceptable Error”.  Hmm.. after some long debugging and hair pulling finally I figured it was not WLW issue or Word Press issue, it was actually an Apache issue.  My hosting provider, all of a sudden decided to install mod_security on the Apache web server.  If configured aggressively, it can cause a lot of problems with many web softwares.

Solution: I added following lines to my .htaccess file in the blog’s path:

<IfModule mod_security.c>
    SecFilterEngine Off
    SecFilterScanPOST Off
</IfModule>

This will remove all the security that mod_security module provides, but otherwise, you need to talk to your hosting provider and ask them to cut down on this security.