aspnet_wp.exe could not be started?

I got this odd error message from an internal web service today that stumped me for ~30 minutes. It was:

“aspnet_wp.exe could not be started. The error code for the failure is 80070545. This error can be caused when the worker process account has insufficient rights to read the .NET Framework files. Please ensure that the .NET Framework is correctly installed and that the ACLs on the installation directory allow access to the configured account.”

I took a look on some forums and blogs and other users who encountered this error said that they checked permisisons on the framework, the temp directory, the ASP.NET Temp directory and the application path. I did the same. Everything was ok, but the app was still broken. Other users said to uninstall and reinstall .NET 1.1 and that fixed it. I didn’t think that was necessary.

How to fix it…

I did some more poking around and noticed that the .NET framework that was executing this was 1.1. It should have been 2.0. Like below:

***Update***:  This problem still intrigued me, so it was looked into some more. It seems that some how a recent install (either WSE 3.0 or AJAX) has caused an issue. All of our 1.1 apps were not responding. Because this server we were working with is a testing box we were able to elevate the permisisons of the ASPNET user higher than “user” and the apps started working again. We elevated the ASPNET user to “Administrator” for the time being. We plan to replace this box in the very near future (few weeks) so its not that big of an issue for us since only developers have access to the system, and, well, its a test system. 🙂 Please note, this is not a desirable thing to do in a production environment.