At work, I recently got an AMD 64 X2-based computer. It is a real screamer. I installed Windows XP Professional x64 because it has a few relevant benefits: it’s based on Windows 2003 x64, it runs IIS 6.0, and all my hardware has x64 drivers.
The biggest benefit of x64 is it can use more than 4GB of RAM. I am only using half that amount, so I am not taking advantage of this feature.
Overall, the x64 experience has been good. All my important 32-bit software runs fine except Windows Desktop Search. Microsoft has no x64 version. (There is an unsupported workaround to get it running on x64, but I am leery about it.) I am using Google Desktop as a workaround. I don’t like that product as well because it has problems dealing with email that is moved from one mailbox to another. The only fix is to switch out of cached mode. This is an inexcusable bug, but it has been around since the product was released.
Anyway, the point of this post is to detail an odd IIS 6.0 error. Any time I surfed any web site on my local machine’s IIS, I only got Service Unavailable. Nothing else.
Examining my local log, I found this error:
This is event ID 2274 on aspnet_filter.dll. The fix is in MSKB 894435. I first used the MSKB’s instructions to switch to ASP.NET 2.0 64-bit. In doing so, I had to disable IIS’s 32 bit mode.
Surprisingly, this cause my FrontPage Extensions to fail:
Another event 2274, but this time the failure is on fpexedll.dll. This surprised me because I installed FrontPage Extensions x64!
It turns out that even though this is supposedly the x64 version, it still runs in 32 bit mode per MSKB 891314.
After putting IIS back in 32-bit mode, everything seem to be working fine.