This was a pain in the butt. Like everyone else I tried registering things, unregistering things, deleting “MBSchema.bin.00000000h” and resetting permissions. None of that worked, or at least none of the entries people talked about. But maybe my problem was from running IIS on a 64-bit machine under 32-bit mode. So I fired up Process Monitor and watched for some ACCESS DENIED error messages. Right away I found w3wp.exe had a problem accessing HKCRWow6432NodeVBScript. I tried giving IUSR_MACHINE the Read permission but that didn’t seem to work. In the end I just decided to give Users and Everyone both Read access to that key. And voila, it worked.

This machine hadn’t been updated in a while and yesterday while connecting to Windows Update we were getting a 0x80070020 error message. After fixing that (a whole other story) we installed a bunch of patches but apparently didn’t notice that they took down our other sites. I’m guessing that somewhere in the middle of the night that the app pools recycled from inactivity because someone would have said something yesterday if they were down. Unfortunately I’m too lazy to go through my logs to figure out what was all applied yesterday so I can’t blame a specific patch and I don’t really care to, either.

After that problem we were getting 8002801d error messages from ASP. After monkeying around for a while I stumbled on a “Microsoft FixIt” tool for this problem and that solved everything. When did these “Microsoft FixIt” things come out? When they work, they’re awesome!