Bob On Development

I have had my head under the hood of some back-end code for quite awhile and haven’t had the need to open any ASP.NET projects, but this morning had to trouble shoot one. Visual Studio complained it couldn’t open the URL. I went to the IIS snap-in and noted that the default web site was stopped. When I’d try to start it, I’d instantly get “Unexpected Error 0×8ffe2740 Occurred”. OK. Well.

Googling around for this, it’s universally said that this error is IIS’s way of saying, “some other process is using port 80 and I can’t get at it”. (Aside: then why in the name of all that’s holy doesn’t it simply SAY that? Nevermind).

The solution is to find the offending process or app and either get rid of it, or get it to use another port. Skype is an often-mentioned culprit; it’s default configuration uses port 80 if available. But I don’t use Skype, and have never had it installed.

Microsoft’s KB article on this issue recommends installing something like TCPView to figure out what’s using what ports, so I installed TCPView but it revealed nothing using port 80. Sometimes a process like SvcHost will host other processes within itself, which TCPView can’t see.

So it just became a game: shut down app after app, try to restart IIS after each shutdown, no joy. Then I started shutting things down in my system tray. Finally, I found the culprit: JungleDisk, an open source program that maps a Windows drive letter to an Amazon S3 storage bucket. I use it for online backups.

When I get a breather I’ll submit this to JungleDisk, but thought this might help someone else in the meantime.