Failed to access IIS metabase

So I’m trying to get my home box setup to run IIS locally and first I must say I am pretty infuriated that there apparently is absolutely no way on this planet to install IIS6 or IIS7 on Windows Xp Pro 32bit, I spent atleast an hour searching and found absolutely nothing in reference to this so I decide I’ll get over with it and install IIS 5.1 the garbage that it is onto my WinXp.

After jumping through all the hoops I run into an error where port 80 is already in use (go Skype ::face palm:: so I resolved that in their advanced options) then I’m presented with this fantastic error message

Failed to access IIS metabase.
Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code.

Exception Details: System.Web.Hosting.HostingEnvironmentException: Failed to access IIS metabase.

The process account used to run ASP.NET must have read access to the IIS metabase (e.g. IIS://servername/W3SVC). For information on modifying metabase permissions, please see http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=267904.

So I say wtf to myself and figure the KB article will solve everything, that article provided aboslutely NO information useful to solving this quickly so I turn to google and find Steve Lippert’s web plog where he posted the solution that required just the single command line call of

%windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\aspnet_regiis.exe -i

You can check out his original article at Failed to access IIS metabase.

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