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Wednesday, September 27, 2006

IIS Problems

Stardate 60092.7
Warning!!! Technical entry. I am keeping a note about this here because I can't think of a better place for it.

I got my new laptop, and installed Internet Information Services on it. I then installed Visual Studio 2005. I ran a simple web page, and got a Server Application error, please check the event log for more details. The application event log recorded the message “the sever failed to load application ‘/LM/W3SVC – The specified metadata was not found.’ The event id was 36. Lots of stuff on the web about this; apparently it’s a common error. It took a while to find the specific fix, and I am not sure how some of the steps were done.

The first problem was that the Distributed Transaction Coordinator was not running, and was not even listed in the Service Control Manager. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling IIS, which was a mistake. This is where I am not sure. I mucked around with msdtc.exe on the command line, and after a while it showed up in services, although it was not running. I set it to start automatically. Tried again, got the same page error, but the event log showed ‘/LM/W3SVC – Class not registered.” I went to the Component Manager and per another web page deleted IIS In-Process Applications, IIS Out-of-Process Pooled Applications, and IIS Utilities. I needed to shutdown IIS before I did this, but I could not remember the shell command. Another Google search reminded me it was IISRESET. I tried IISRESET STOP, and was greeted by ‘The RPC server is unavailable.’ It took another hour before I discovered the command was IISRESET /STOP. Then I went to %windir%\system32\inetsrv, and typed:
rundll32 wamreg.dll,CreateIISPackage
Then
regsvr32 asptxn.dll

I tried the web page again. This time I got an ‘XML Parsing Error: Not well-formed’ on the first line of the page. Another quick search revealed my problem, I had uninstalled IIS, and it no longer knew about ASP.NET. I ran the Visual Studio command prompt (the same as the normal command prompt, except it adds a few more directories to the PATH), and typed:
aspnet_regiis –i

I tried the page again, and again, the same error. Further down the same Google search was a question about running under Firefox, and how it caches the page. I did a Ctrl-F5, and lo, it worked. And there was much rejoicing.

End of Entry