I am just taking a quick show of hands; and maybe some information, if you are willing. (And if this hasn't happened to you, I apologize for taking up your time.)
I have had various problems on multiple installations of Books Online throughout the entire Katmai / SQL Server 2008 cycle. They have been on both 32 and 64-bit; with / without IE8 installed; and with / without Visual Studio installed.
Currently I have one instance where IE8 is not installed, BOL is alongside 2005 on Server 2003, and every single link is not clickable at all. Just no response... I can only navigate to items through the index or search results. On a similar machine the links work, but every single one leads to a page that says, "Sorry, no topics were found for the selected link." Again I must navigate via index or search results. Which is really too bad, because some of those links are much tougher to track down. And now I came across a much more isolated case where on a Vista SP1 machine with IE8 installed, a certain link leads to this "sorry" page from one topic, but not from another topic (the difference is an xmlns attribute in the link, which I think may be the cause of the problem).
You can see what I am talking about in more detail in the following Connect items:
http://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=290461
http://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=357008
(I have some other items about messed-up formatting in IE8, and a lot of others have submitted the same. But I am more curious here about the links, as the formatting issue is being addressed.)
I can't imagine that this kind of thing happens differently across every single machine / VM I use, but it doesn't happen to anyone else? If you have had any issues clicking links in Books Online, please drop a note here providing any specific information we can relay back to Microsoft so they can try harder to reproduce these issues. I mean really, I am not making this stuff up... please help me escape from this madness!
Thanks!