SharePoint SSL-Offloading causes access denied error.

Hi All,

I'm hoping someone might be able to help me as I am now at my wits end with what seems to be a pretty unique problem. I have a sharepoint environment which I have recently set up F5 to in order to control access and act as a load balancer.

Originally my problem was one that has readily been solved by many on this community. It was that when I tried to access the drop down menu for list items I had a constant "Loading..." label appear and no drop down menu. I solved this in the way that many blogs and topics suggested which was to ensure that the "Alternative access mappings" in Sharepoint were set up correctly. These are now set correctly and as they should be but they have revealed a further, slightly more bizarre problem.

Now when I navigate to the website I found I am constantly attempting to reauthenticate, clicking cancel reveals then my default sharepoint page except without any CSS or Javascript applied. After further investigation it seems that when trying to access my CSS files directly (found under _layouts/1033/etc) I constantly get an access denied error.

This only happens when I use the sharepoint site through F5 and to make sure nothing is playing foul with me I have removed my access profile, disabled acceleration and compression, removed all iRules I was previously using and basically stripped it down until all F5 is doing is forwarding me onto the sharpoint pool (which points to port 80). Finally, this doesn't happen if I switch off SSL-offloading (I followed the Sharepoint 2010 document on setting up an iApp based on their templates), without SSL offloading everything just works perfectly..

Thanks!