UPDATE: After additional research, and with thanks to our customers, we have regrettably discovered that our own products were the cause of the issues discussed in this post. Two products were directly affected:

• Calendar Plus Web Part: This product resulted in text being displayed in the top left of the screen.
• Rating Column: This product caused the Ribbon and scrollbar to be disabled.

 If you have either or both of these products deployed to your SharePoint farm, with apologies, we ask that you please upgrade to the latest release, in which the bugs have been fixed.

Bamboo recently upgraded our portal security from Microsoft ISA (Internet Security and Acceleration) to Forefront UAG (Unified Access Gateway) 2010. This creates a centralized gateway which allows users to login once, and quickly access links to Microsoft Web applications including on-premises SharePoint and Exchange Web Mail while still providing powerful security… but it comes at a cost.

Here at Bamboo Solutions, we live off of SharePoint Server 2010 as our central mechanism of communication, including utilizing our own products, such as:

• Project Management Central
• Discussion Board Plus

(To name just a couple that are critical to our everyday operations.)  After launching the new Forefront UAG, we began experiencing some odd behavior, which included:

1. Scrollbars were disabled, making it impossible to scroll up, down, left, or right. Clicking and dragging the cursor in those directions (highlighting the page) it worked fine, but, well, you know…
2. Ribbons were disabled.  When trying to click on a Ribbon tab in a page nothing happened, and when we opened an item’s properties in pop-up window, all actions were disabled.

Here are the solutions that I found:

1. Do not access your Web Applications directly, passing the Forefront UAG URL.  In a Forefront UAG deployment, there is a central URL that you launch to login; if you instead provide a link to go directly to the SharePoint site, for example, you will have problems (even though you receive a Forefront UAG login screen when you access SharePoint directly).  Similarly, say you do login to Forefront UAG first, but you then open a new tab in the same browser and enter a direct URL to the SharePoint site, you will still suffer the issues.  Instead, login to Forefront UAG and then click on the SharePoint link from the Application and Network Access Portal page.  This will launch SharePoint in a new tab in the same browser session. You will now be able to enter direct links to items, pages, and sites in the same browser session.
2. If your password is about to expire, it could be a factor in causing the abovementioned issues.  Everyone at Bamboo didn’t experience this, but I did.  I checked if my password was about to expire opening the Outlook Web App. If your password is about to expire, a message is displayed on the top of the Outlook Web App. Upon changing my password, the issues described above went away. To change your password, return to the Application and Network Access Portal page and click the icon that looks like  , then select Change Password and follow the instructions.

I hope that you find these workarounds useful!