Windows Process Activation Service – Error 183

This is not related to TFS, but I need a place to write this down. On one of our runtime machines, we had an issue where II 7 stopped running. It turns out that the Windows Process Activation Service (WAS) was down. When trying to restart WAS, we got an Error 183 – Unable to create file (or something like that). When trying to open Event Viewer or any other snap-ins to MMC, we got a “could not load snap-in error.”

Through hair pulling and swearing, we finally tracked down a machine.config change that one of my colleagues made. In the process of doing some tuning, the I haven’t reviewed the schema, but I’m guessing this is not valid as it does not make sense.

After removing the autoConfig, we were back up and running. Thanks to Carlo for pointing us in the right direction.

<processModel maxWorkerThreads="100" maxIoThreads="100" minWorkerThreads="50" memoryLimit="90"/>

<httpRuntime minFreeThreads="12"/>

<processModel autoConfig="true"/>