It looks like I've resolved the issue so hopefully this will help someone else in the future. I went back through the Microsoft patterns & practices artilce entitled "Building Secure ASP.NET Applications: Authentication, Authorization, and Secure Communication" ( http://tinyurl.com/3xacf )

Before I used the information in this article to try and fix my existing ASPNET account but that never seemed to work. So I followed this article verbatim and created a new account "CustomASPNET" was their example (could be whatever you want of course).

NOTE: Be sure that you reboot after having completed the steps in this article. Immediately after I finished the steps I still received the error. Only after rebooting did the error finally go away.

Clay




>For some reason I now get this error message when I try to open a solution that I've been opening without any problems until this morning.
>
>

>The Web server reported the following error when
>attempting to create or open the Web project
>located at the following URL: 'http://localhost/myapp'.
>'HTTP/1.1 500 Internal Server Error'.
>

>
>Again, this error message is not via my browser, it occurs in VS.NET 2003 as soon as I try to open my solution (which obviously contains an ASP.NET project).
>
>I'm using VSS 6.0 and so I deleted all of local directories, deleted the virtual directory via IIS and then re-added everthing from VS.NET File>Source Control>Open From Source Control. VS.NET proceeds in this process without any problem, it creates the virtual directory in IIS, no problems, etc. Then I try to open the solution and get the same error. Again. Ugh.
>
>I've checked directory security and can't see a problem there (all the dirs get re-created anyway when I pull back in from VSS).
>
>I've tried changing the userName and password values in machine.config's "processModel" element to "ASPNET" and "password" (I changed ASPNET's password to "password")...I've also tried going back to "machine" and "AutoGenerate" or "SYSTEM" and "AutoGenerate"....same results.
>
>I've also made sure that the "ASP.NET State Service" service is running.
>
>Any other ideas? This is really frustrating because all was working well yesterday evening. I shut my laptop down. Came in this morning...turned on laptop...go into VS.NET...open the solution and whammo, this lovely error out of nowhere.
>
>I've also checked out what these links (below) have to say and still same resulting error message. I can create a traditional ASP page in that virtual directory with some simple VBScript in it and it loads in my browser just fine.
>
>http://dotnetjunkies.com/weblog/petergekko/posts/3796.aspx
>
>http://www.dotnetboards.com/viewtopic.php?t=5599&view=previous