“CAUTION: provisional headers are shown” in Chrome debugger

Question

I noticed a strange caution message when looking at downloaded resources using Google chrome inspector (F12):

Caution provisional headers a

Answer 1

This caution message also occurs if the response is invalid and therefore dropped by the browser.

In my case the request was correctly sent to the server, the server-side code then produced an error and my custom error handling returned the error message in the HTTP status message field. But this error was not received on the client side, due to invalid characters in the error message (described here http://aspnetwebstack.codeplex.com/workitem/1386) which resulted in corrupt response headers.