Solution: Exchange Issues, World Wide Web Publishing Server failed to Start

A power failure recently caused a slew of issues with one of our Small Business Server machines and while I got most of them fixed in fairly short order, I couldn’t get email clients (Outlook or mobile devices) to connect to Exchange, despite all of Exchange’s services running fine.

As I know Exchange leans heavily on Internet Information Services (IIS) I checked that service and sure enough, the service was in a stopped state and any attempt to start it resulted in a message saying:

Windows could not start the World Wide Web Publishing Service server on Local Computer

Error 1068: The dependency service or group failed to start.

I immediately checked the dependencies and found only one other service, the Windows Process Activation Service:

Obviously the next step was to browse to the Windows Process Activation Service service (annoying name huh?) and try and start that.  That yielded another error saying:

Windows could not start the Windows Process Activation Service service on Local Computer

Error 13: The data is invalid

The Solutions

I found three different solutions online and have presented them in order of severity (the third one worked for me):

Command Line Fix

In a command prompt with elevated privilages, run the following (where C:\ the OS drive:)

fsutil resource setautoreset true c:\

Reboot

Recreate AppPools Folder

Check the C:/inetpub/temp folder on your system, if there is no AppPools folder then create one and reboot.

Restore ApplicationHost.config

Restore the ApplicationHost.config file from the IIS history folders (an automatic backup of previous versions) by doing the following:

Locate the most recent history folder  in the C:/inetpub/history folder:

In the folder, locate the ApplicationHost.Config file and copy it:

Browse to the folder c:\Windows\System32\inetsrv\config and paste the retrieve applicationhost.config file there, overwriting the existing one.

Try and restart the Windows Process Activation Service (it should work fine now)

Try and restart the World Wide Web Publishing service

Now I’d recommend rebooting the server to ensure any other services that we’re reliant on these services fire up correctly.