VS 2012 IIS Express 8 - Unable to launch the IIS E

Question

I'm trying to run an MVC 4 project in IIS Express 8 (because that is apparently what comes with VS 2012) and every time I've tried to run it from VS, I get the following error.

Unable to launch the IIS Express Web server.

14:53:48: Error: Cannot initialize OLE

14:53:48: Error: Cannot initialize OLE

Launching IIS Express through WebMatrix seems to work fine. I've tried uninstalling and reinstalling, but nothing seems to work. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

I'm not sure this will help but it worked for me. After uninstalling IIS make sure you delete the IISExpress folder (on Windows 7 this is located in My Documents\IISExpress). This is where the IIS config files live and if you don't delete it after the uninstall the newly installed IIS will end up using the old config files.

Answer 2

I didn't see the OLE error you're having, but everything else is similar...

checking the event view, I was seeing an IIS error preloading .NET 4.0.30306. All the config files were pointing at 4.0.30319.

But... under my Windows/Microsoft.NET/Framework/ (and Framework64) I had what appeared to be a partial installation of a v4.0.30306.

Deleting both those .30306 folders and rebooting fixed the IIS Launch issue for me.