Windows Live Writer problem with Movable Type?

I struggled today to get Windows Live Writer to work with my blog. I am running Movable Type and I kept getting a 406 – Not Acceptable error. I even tried BlogDesk and when BlogDesk gave me the same error,  I started to think that the error was on my server’s end.

It turns out that the server admins had implemented a fairly aggressive security policy that was preventing remote procedure calls to movable type. To correct the problem, I added a file called .htaccess to my cgi-bin directory with the following content-

<FilesMatch “(mt-xmlrpc.cgi)”>
SecFilterEngine Off
</FilesMatch>

That fixed it!

*NOTE: For some reason, MovableType would not let me “xmlrpc” as a string and I had to use the 7-Bit ASCII equivalent of one of the letters to do it. See http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_ascii.asp for all the 7-Bit ASCII codes.