>Found a few things I did wrong - for one, there was no * handler for static files - the above error vanished when I added that... so I got pretty much everything in order now.

Are you using Apache? Or IIS? Sounds like Apache. IAC, * handlers should inherit from the root Web site/service so it's odd that that doesn't work.

Unfortunately my Apache configuration help is limited to what's being put into the configuration by the auto-configuration tools in Web Connection. Beyond that you're mostly on your own...

>
>Two things still confuse me:
>
>- the version of index.html, with immediate redirection, still fires. I have edited it to require a click to link (just to see that it actually loads), but it still loads this old version

It's probably cached. Try explicitly reloading (Ctrl-F5 in the browser) to force a refresh bypassing your browser cache.

>- when I switch to file mode, the server still loads two instances of my exe as a COM server. Never seen it do that in earlier versions. Any explanation?

That shouldn't be happening. either those two instances are left over from before or you have FileStartInstances set to a value > 0 in wc.ini and an UpdateExe set, which will cause the EXEs to be launched automatically.

>- When I restart the IIS, these instances get stuck, and two more are loaded etc (they don't load immediately, so I don't know when exactly do they load - when the app pool is recycled, when the website is restarted or only when the whole IIS is). I have seen some references to a dll_unload in the error logs. Is it possible that my executable gets stuck on an error somewhere (just discovered that I do get some unhandled errors). I guess this will go away once it's bullet proof again (works fine on two other servers, so this is probably caused by a nearly empty database, few things are missing), without any cancel-ignore dialogs. Am I guessing right?

Yes this sounds like FileStartInstances is set to a value greater than 0 - the count for this will launch the EXE's on startup.

Since these are file instances they don't auto-unload, but you can manually unload them from the ISAPI/.NET Module admin page.

If you're not running file based in production you should FileStartInstances at 0.

FWIW, you'll get quicker responses on the West Wind Message Board (www.west-wind.com/wwThreads/) since I don't check messages over here as much.

Hope this helps,

+++ Rick ---