ASP.NET 3.5 / IIS 6 Output Garbled / Corrupt

Question

I have inherited a web application and when trying when trying to put it on the same server on a different IP and IIS site I get a page full of stuff like this in all browsers. (not sure how the server here will output this but it is basically the same as if you were to open a binary in a text editor or bad character encoding).

���r#ə6��{��Ί��&��6�K�MЀh��"Pd�AP;�RN�K9�r��<ϛ���!��GZ�4��J�z�����R'���i�j�uZLe�V`=��&��T!e]rGVx#d��N���V���w>���pc�hw��B>��^�|L�]��3�~-��g��n��n�i�>Z� �ٲ������z_�����U�,i��2��\�+���F��FB���m��r�7�v��7�}�U�N�o�G�K�o?�w凲��و�����ߓ�x!���_?��V��v�/V��olt˭Z����� >M�kwkh&��j�C3�|̓��=�8��jJ����Uo�~��T7�\w�eW�������u*���f0c��}�.����]o������7���|�;}�&O���N�)[ys��+Q��o�T�~����F����c���έm��.�Q�ů�2@P���i�ˠ�~g��u�<|   $ۭ>zZ/e��'�;R�'���v�ˠ�����

I've copied the same build and all its files to the site running under another IP, used the <globalization> web.config tag and set all encoding to UTF-8 and for the hell of it I even tried setting it to ASCII.

The application, although written for users in only US cities does make use of localization resource files for Russian and Romanian since it had been outsourced to developers there. I guess they did so to make things easier on developers who may have been less fluent in english, who knows.

Besides using the exact same copy running in production and changing web.config encoding settings I have found it runs fine on my IIS 7/Windows 7 workstation, tried throwing a uncompiled copy up there with .cs files and all, wrote a simple ASPX page that performed a response.write (which came out fine).

So as you can see I am pretty much at a roadblock and decided to ask the fine professional community we have here. Any input you may have on this matter would be highly appreciated.

Answer 1

It's probably a long shot based on your description, but from a little Internet digging, a couple of forum posters have mentioned bad NICs corrupting packets. You did say you had the app on a different IP on the server -- does your server have more than 1 NIC?

Answer 2

I fixed it by exporting the IIS settings for the production system that it worked fine on and created a new IIS site from that file. Sadly I could see no difference between the 2 before I did this but if you run into this issue then here is another thing you can add to your list of troubleshooting tasks.