Fixing the “Specified web server is not running ASP.NET version 1.1” Error

I could no longer put off some work on an ASP.NET 1.1 application so I fired up Visual Studio 2003 and immediately got the “specified web server is not running ASP.NET version 1.1” error. This, despite the fact that ASP.NET 1.1 was set in IIS as the framework version for that app.

There are plenty of posts about this around the Net, and most of them tell you to either run aspnet_regiis -i (and/or aspnet_regiis -r) or to do some sort of time-killing mummery that involves uninstalling / reinstalling some combination of IIS, VS 2003, and/or the 1.1 framework.

I found only one passing mention of what I really needed: this error can also be caused if you either don’t have FrontPage extensions installed, or have inadvertently deleted some or all of the FrontPage folders (_vti_conf, _vti_pvt, etc) from the application root. Indeed I had blown away some of those folders. The solution is to fire up Add/Remove Programs | Add/Remove Windows Components, highlight Internet Information Services (IIS) and click Details, then uncheck FrontPage Extensions to uninstall it, then go through the process again, checking the Front Page option to reinstall it.