Hi Stig,
The root cause of the problem is that the body of the 500
status code isn't returned to the flash player from the browsers.
This prevents the Flash Player from passing it along to you. Keep
in mind that the FlashPlayer is just a control that runs within the
browser; as a result it's restricted by what the browser provides
to it. The body of a 500 error message isn't one of the things
provided to it.
The Flash Player needs to play to the least common
denominator and while some browsers do provide the web service's
500 error body the Flash Player requires ubiquity. This is why the
feature isn't implemented within the Flash Player... when all
browsers provide this data then Adobe needs to add the feature.
Adobe has logged a bug on these issues with the browser companies.
To workaround the issue use LCDS or BlazeDS as proxies. They
have been coded to return a 200 status response instead of the 500
error allowing you to access the error message. Adobe has been
aware of this issue and this is the suggested resolution to the
problem. It's not ideal but it's the best we currently have
available.
Here's a great article that talks about this:
http://blog.flexmonkeypatches.com/2008/05/16/soap-fault-messages-in-flexflash-player-error-2032-stre...-Kurt.