I quickly went over to check out what’s going on with pcAnywhere, and the machine is running fine, but IIS is stopped. And can’t restart. I tried to restart the Web Server several times, but the service restart with IISReset just hangs and never completes or goes through very quickly as if it thinks the service is already running. The service manage shows all sites as stopped. And also won’t restart them.

I check the event log. There are tons of restart attempts in the log but nothing that before that seems to point at what’s causing the initial failure. Finally, I gave up and just decided to re-boot the box. Before I shut down the server and restarted, I checked memory, connections and all other vital signs none of which looked like a problem, but IIS would just not restart. Even manually shutting down all the services (ok-killing them) did not get IIS back to life. When I finally rebooted the server it popped right back up and ran no problem.

IIS 6 has been rock solid since I installed it way back when and this is the first software hiccup other than some self inflicted pain with DTC a while back. But, this sort of thing is always scary especially when there are no symptoms whatsoever, and worse no errors anywhere.