>::as soon as I saw it in IIS, I found that this was not correct
>
>May I ask how you knew it was incorrect? Are WSs only able to run on Low protection or something?

No the problem here is more involved than that. IIS has always had problems with COM components to some degree and IIS on Win2k uses an external process to hand of processing of ASP.Net and ASP.Net Web Service requests. These are handled via remote calls and apparently this causes problems when VFP COM components (EXE and DLL) are involved.

As Michel mentions, Web Connection has had problems for years with this particular problem in Win2k because of it's DCOM messaging that somehow confused IIS's funky COM environment. This is fixed in Windows Server 2003 (or probably not fixed, but handled completely differently and without COM on IIS's part).

I've seen major problems with this too if you have:

Classic ASP apps that use COM components and ASP.Net apps that use VFP COM components. Same behavior - it locks up for about 2-4 minutes, then starts working fine.

WWWC applications and ASP.Net COM - same behavior.

I've also seen this happen with ASP.net applications that don't use COM but it's not as definited.

Again, none of this happens under Windows Server 2003, which removes the whole mess that IIS 5 was in terms of COM environment.

I would highly recommend that anybody who's running COM components of any kind start looking at switching to Windows Server quickly. Besides eliminating issues like this, you also get much better performance and a much more stable environment for COM components!