MVC WebApplication no longer starts in IIS Express

I was changing OAuth/Owin settings and Azure publish settings in a Web Application project this morning, but soon after we decided deployment will be to a specific IIS Azure VM (now visible across our local domain). All code/setting changes have been reverted.

At one point I also changed the drivers\etc\hosts file to allow a dummy name for Microsoft OAuth, but that has been reverted.

Notes:

My startup URL is http://localhost:22222/
I am running under IIS Express (as my local Dev VM will not allow me to install full IIS)
When I start the Web Application with IE I simply get "This page can't be displayed"
If I start it with Chrome I get "This webpage is not available", but it also changes the browser URL to https://localhost (note the s, i.e. using SSL).
I have pulled the project down fresh from source control. No change.
The project is under TFS source control.
Another developer on the same project has the latest files and it works fine.
If I run any other Web Application project, they work just fine.
All OWIN registration of providers has been commented out. No change.
Deleted the entire project folder and pulled fresh from TFS. No change. This probably means a local machine setting somewhere is the cause?

What could I have damaged in my Web Application to cause this problem? I have been scratching my head for hours now and nothing we try is working. The application simply will not start in any browser.

Project Web Settings tab:

Answer at bottom, given to this chromium issue [issue 444479] helped me:

Same here - I also believe caused by HSTS - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Strict_Transport_Security

If you have (developed) any other localhost sites which send a HSTS header...

eg. Strict-Transport-Security: max-age=31536000; includeSubDomains; preload

...then depending on the value of max-age, future requests to localhost will be required to be served over HTTPS.

To get around this, I did the following.

In the Chrome address bar type "chrome://net-internals/#hsts"

At the very bottom of a page is QUERY domain textbox - verify that localhost is known to the browser

If it is, DELETE the localhost domain using the textbox above

Your site should now work using plain old HTTP

HTH,

Jay

ps. This is not a permanent solution, but will at least get it working between projects. If anyone knows how to permanently exclude localhost from the HSTS list please let me know :)