After a little help from several folks at Microsoft I finally managed to get the VSNet 2005 Community Distribution to run ASP.Net 2.0 properly after my original install disasters. The problem turns out to be a fault in the installer which incorrectly creates registry entries for the ASP.Net mappings in the registry. These registry keys are corrupt and point at bogus filenames.

 

This particular problem fouled up both of my installs both on Windows 2003 and my VPC XP install (which is unbearably slow even after installing the Virtual Machine Additions). With the fixes in place now both machines work with ASP. Net. In quick testing my existing apps run fine under 2.0 and (more importantly) I was able to switch these 1.1 apps to the 1.1 version of the framework. Under both OSs fixing the reg keys fixed the crashing problems in the IIS Management console.

 

Here’s what needed to get done:

 

Find the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\ASP.NET key look for errant key entries that include braces and other junk. The bogus keys look like this:

 

2.0.40301.9 (pd4.040301-0900)

 

Clear out the key names to read proper version numbers. It looks like .Net 2.0 installs two different versions of the CLR:

 

2.0.40301.0

2.0.40301.9

 

Inside of those keys make sure that the DllFullPath and Path values point at the correct .Net Framework directories in your Windows installation. For example:

 

d:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.40301\aspnet_isapi.dll (DllFullPath)

d:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.40301 (Path)

 

I did notice that after renaming the higher level keys a new badly named key appeared. I’m assuming this is part of the Visual Web Developer Server code that tries to write the registry if it doesn’t find a proper ASP. Net registration for the current version. This time I left in that key and fixed up the path and didn’t see any problems.

 

I want to thank Yag for putting me in contact with the right people and especially Chris Riccio for getting a quick solution and get this resolved. Now if I only had a little more time to play, but I’m out on site this week for training. Aaack.