Internet Explorer - "Show friendly HTTP error messages"

Question

I have configured a servlet within web.xml to handle exceptions, and my servlet is indeed triggered when an exception occurs.
My users are all running Internet Explorer. By default the advanced setting "Show friendly HTTP error messages" is enabled, which causes them to see an ugly MSIE error page rather than my carefully crafted servlet.
They could see the awful exception pages Tomcat was handling out previously, which is why I set about making this change in the first place.
I believe that Tomcat was not adding an error code header to the exception page it was handing out on my behalf, but now that I've taken over exception handling the response contains a code 500 response. (My best guess, anyhow.)
I was going to simply strip this code out of the response, but upon inspection of the HttpServletResponse object, there is no method for doing such a thing.
Is anyone familiar with this issue? Can anyone recommend a solution?
Meanwhile, I'm off to continue scouring the forums before I start Googling again. =)
Thanks!!

Answer 1

Well, those "friendly" errors have to be based on the response code for the page. So if you have your own error handling returning a page, then you could return a 200 response code with whatever error content you want.
For all practical purposes, the response code isn't very useful to users or browsers except for a few special ones maybe. But just because it's an error page to your web app doesn't mean it's an error for the browser. Those error codes are really meant for the HTTP protocol.