Windows 7 - turn on IIS - failing

Question

I have been trying for a day now to enable various IIS services on a laptop.

Using Control Panel, Programs and Features, Turn Windows Features On and Off.

The key feature I am trying to enable is ASP.NET.

I get a stupid error message that gives no clue (An error has occurred. Not all of the features were successfully changed.), but the event log shows a whole string of errors, starting as below.

Unable to install counter strings because the SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\ASP.NET_64_2.0.50727\Performance key could not be opened or accessed. The first DWORD in the Data section contains the Win32 error code. 020000000E0E0000

Installing the performance counter strings for service ASP.NET_64_2.0.50727 (ASP.NET_64_2.0.50727) failed. The first DWORD in the Data section contains the error code. 02000000C9120000

I have searched the net, and tried various remedies, all with no success.

These threads discuss the same topic, without solving it:

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windows/en-US/d711ecd1-620c-473c-af39-e607bbe2ec18/turn-windows-features-on-or-off-application-development-features?forum=w7itproinstall

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/tom/archive/2008/04/11/asp-net-performance-counters-missing.aspx

I tried uninstalling all versions of ASP.NET using aspnet_regiis.exe -Ua on each and every version on Framework and Framework64, then adding them back. None of this has made any difference whatsoever.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

I had this problem too. I had 2 errors logged in the Windows Application Event Log:

• Unable to install counter strings because the SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\ASP.NET_64\Performance key could not be opened or accessed
• Installing the performance counter strings for service ASP.NET_64 (ASP.NET_64) failed. The first DWORD in the Data section contains the error code.

Note that these msgs are similar, but not the same as the original poster, probably due to different versions and time moving on. I'm on Windows 7 64-bit, with various .NET Frameworks installed, at least 3.5 and 4.x, plus some remnants at least of 2.x. I have Visual Studio 2010 Pro installed, and just installed VS 2013 Community this morning. I already had IIS installed, and I think it was installed before any VS versions. This is the first time I explicitly tried to enable ASP.NET under IIS on this machine.

If you look in the registry, it's true, this key does not exist: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\ASP.NET_64

I narrowed down the problem to the .NET Extensibility feature, on which the ASP.NET feature depends and automatically checks/enables (not that this helped me).

I followed the other answer in this thread: "Control Panel > Programs > Turn Windows features on or off, and switched off Internet Information Services (which will turn off all the subfeatures), then clicked OK. [Reboot as prompted.] Then I went back to the Control Panel and turned on all the IIS services I needed and the error did not resurface."

HOWEVER, be sure to enable the ASP.NET feature (which auto-checks/enables related dependent features such as the problematic .NET Extensibility feature) at the time you are re-enabling IIS. If you do it at the same time, the registry key is successfully re-added, if not then not. Doing it piecemeal didn't work for me and just resulted in the same error message. A reboot was not required for the enabling (just the disabling), but I have found that changes over time.

Note that there are other problems out there that generate errors when this feature is added to IIS. Apparently if IIS is installed before ASP.NET then the solution is the register ASP.NET with IIS. There are MS pages around that tell you how. (e.g. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/tom/archive/2008/04/11/asp-net-performance-counters-missing.aspx) Use the link to the ASP.NET IIS Registration Tool to fix that problem (although this disable and re-enable of IIS may also work).

I went through these other fixes and they didn't help me. At least one generated an error, but again probably because I had that ASP.NET_64 registry key missing. The standard Windows Fix tool didn't do anything for me either. Updating my .NET Framework to the latest (there happened to be an update to 4.5.2 or something similar) didn't help either.

My guess, in hindsight, is that maybe VS 2010 is too old, and is 32-bit on my 64-bit OS, and it resulted in problems with my registry keys. Maybe. I'm just guessing.

(I would have simply commented on the other answer/solution, but apparently I don't have sufficient points - this would seem to be a flaw in that design.)

Answer 2

I was having the same issue with Windows 7 Enterprise but this worked for me:

Control Panel > Programs > Turn Windows features on or off, and switched off Internet Information Services (which will turn off all the subfeatures), then clicked OK. Then I went back to the Control Panel and turned on all the IIS services I needed and the error did not resurface.