[thelist] (possible) site downloader causing site to throw errors

[Sarah Sweeney]

A site that I work on has a ColdFusion error handler set up to send me 
an email anytime the site throws an error. I've gotten a few of these 
error reports which appear to be caused by a site downloader (or 
something else, I'm not quite sure), which is munging the querystring. 
The page that is throwing the error is reported to have a querystring 
like this:
http://www.thesite.com/getfile.cfm?cat=3%26doc=46%26file=57
And the user agent reported is "Microsoft Data Access Internet 
Publishing Provider Protocol Discovery". I've set up some IP tracking to 
see if I can narrow down the origins of these requests, but it turns out 
the IP address is one used by several users, so I figure it's either a 
public computer or an IP being reassigned within an office. I've done 
some googling on this user agent string, and haven't come up with 
anything conclusive about where it comes from.

So I have 2 questions:
1) Is there a way to "repair" a querystring which has been munged like this?
2) Does anyone know where the UA string "Microsoft Data Access Internet 
Publishing Provider Protocol Discovery" comes from? Is it something I 
should worry about?

-- 
Sarah Sweeney
Web Developer & Programmer
Portfolio :: http://sarah.designshift.com
Blog, etc :: http://hardedge.ca