I encountered this error while deploying an ASP.NET website to IIS 5.1 on Windows XP SP2. It’s really been a head hitting issue to track it down until I got something interesting after a lot of Googling exercise that I would love to share with you. But before that please allow me to explain what it took for me reaching at the resolution. I uninstalled the .NET framework, restarted the system and re-installed it… No luck. Following another tip I went through the Web.Config file and changed the Authentication Mode to “None” but no luck though. Also gone through the event viewer to track down the issue where I got another error – “aspnet_wp.exe (PID: 664) stopped unexpectedly“. Fortunately I landed on this page which took me to the divine:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4322878/server-application-unavailable-in-asp-net
Thanks to Sachin Shanbhag for sharing this tip on stackoverflow.
The problem was having multiple .NET frameworks installed on that system. I uninstalled all the previous versions using :
“aspnet_regiis.exe –ua“
By default it will be found at %windir%Microsoft.NETFramework.
After the uninstallation I installed the version of 2.0 using:
“aspnet_regiis.exe –i“
Hope this solution help somebody 🙂