Application pool reset breaks ASP site

Question

I am seeing a weird behavior on IIS7 on Windows 2008. I have an ASP MVC application installed and fully functioning. Every time i reset its application pool, the website stops working and displays a 404 error.

The only workaround I found for this is: 1. Rename default.aspx, global.aspx, and web.config to something else 2. Create a simple index.htm file and place it in the root 3. Browse to the site (which correctly displays index.htm) 4. Rename the three files back

At that point the site will load properly and work as expected. Anyone has any idea why that would happen?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Check out the Windows Event Viewer, under Application. The website might be throwing an exception each time it attempts to restart.