Out clients never use the Interactive acct, so that can't be the cause in itself. They either run the Launching user (SYSTEM) - this was the case for the most recent incident - or assign a specific account.

My guess is it's a permissions issue of some sort where the system is trying to start up IIS when the permissions and logons aren't properly setup. The permissions then cache and continue to fail the process in question until restarted once the system is up and running.

The customer claims that, rather than showing up during a reboot, the system was running and went down on its own - when they looked for a cause they found the worker process errors in the event logs. At least that's how it was reported to me - it's possible that something else brought down the system and they rebooted in an attempt to fix it and only then spotted the errors.

As I said I don't see this anymore on Server 2008, but that's no guarantee that in other environments it may not still be an issue. It's a startup timing issue for sure and as such difficult to pinpoint because almost every system is configured differently.

If anyone has seen these errors (IIS Worker Process Error where the faulting application is w3wp.exe and the faulting module is wc.dll) under Server 2008 I would appreciate hearing about it. It would be nice if M$ fixed those timing issue under the new OS.

--stein

+++ Rick ---

Reviving an old post (again) - unfortunately it remains relevant as we continue to encounter this issue. We're up to nearly 200 installations of our web connect app and only a handful have reported these errors, and in most cases they show up when rebooting, then go away as things "settle in". I'd be inclined to ignore it entirely except that we've had to instances in the past 3 months where it apparently brought our entire application down. Things would be working fine, then suddenly any hit on wc.dll would get no response and eventually time out. We were able to get things going again after rebooting/restarting IIS (relying on secondhand info from the sysops so can't report the exact sequence). One incident was from last December - things seem be working since then. The other happened this morning so I'm hoping for a similar outcome...

One question - has anyone run into this under Server 2008? All cases we've encountered have been running 2003 - I'm wondering if it's safe to suggest a server upgrade as a solution if problems persist for a given client? (From Rick's earlier posts on this it's clear that nobody at M$ was inclined to fix anything under the older OS but I'm hoping that maybe things are better with the newer product.)

--stein

One of my clients is reporting a series of IIS Worker Process errors after rebooting. The faulting application is w3wp.exe and the faulting module is wc.dll, which prompted him to call me. He gets a few of these during the reboot process, then again the first couple of times we hit a wc link (along with a Service Unavailable message in the browser). Then magically things start to work.

But as soon as we reboot we get another string of errors.

He claims this just started happening today, and I don't recall ever seeing this error on any of our 100+ client systems, so I was rather weirded out when I logged onto one of my servers a bit later and encountered the exact same message (also pointing to a problem with wc.dll...) In my case at least, there was just one message and nothing showed up after I rebooted. (In both cases we're running WC 5.33 under Win 2003.)

I checked the MS hotfix status - doesn't appear they pushed anything out last night though they did put out a security patch a week ago.

Just wondering if anyone else has run across this recently.

--stein