Can't access localhost/iis after installing Oracle and loopback adaptor

Question

Recently I installed Oracle and the required Microsoft Loopback Adaptor, which worked fine. However, this seems to have screwed up IIS (or at least its interaction with Visual Studio) somehow. I can't connect to localhost or 127.0.0.1 anymore, and I can't even open a web project in Visual Studio 2008 (which used to work fine), getting the error "The local IIS URL http://localhost/MyProject specified for the Web project MyProject has not been configured. In order to open this project the virtual directory needs to be configured. Would you like to create this directory now?" I click yes, then it gives an error that it "could not find the server http://localhost on the current machine".

IIS is running and I can connect to the default IIS website and other contents of inetput/wwwroot on localhost:1122.

I tried to disable the loopback adaptor and comment out the line I needed to add to hosts to get Oracle working, and while this has stopped Oracle from working, it hasn't helped with IIS/localhost.

edit: this turned out to be fixed by restoring the project from a backup, so it must have been an issue with the project itself of some sort.

Answer 1

I am guessing it's a problem with the loopback adaptor. You might have to restore your Connection settings properly. Check whether the loopback adaptor is properly disabled and whether Connection settings are correct from Control Panel->Network Connections. Edit: Also it would be better to restart the system after you have made all the necessary changes in the settings.

Answer 2

You could configure your local IIS to listen on a different port. Right click Default website, tab Web site, then Advanced. Add for example 1234 as a TCP port.

Then you can connect like http://localhost:1234/YourProject

You can open the website in Visual Studio from the file system, and specify the new URL in Project -> Property Pages -> Start Options -> Use custom server.

Answer 3

Ok, I finally managed to get this working by deleting the project and restoring from a backup. I guess the project configuration had somehow become screwed up in such a way as to cause the error I got, rather than there being a problem with IIS itself. Sorry for the false alarm.

Answer 4

Something similar happened to me today on Windows XP and IIS 5.whatever-it-is. The problem is that a tool I installed had created some Virtual Directories without an Application Name under the Default Web Site.

The solution was to open up the IIS snap-in, right-click and choose Properties for the offending virtual directories, and make up an "Application name" under the "Virtual Directory" tab of the Properties dialog that pops up. It didn't matter what I named it, as long as there was no virtual directory under the Default Web Site with a blank application name.