IIS and Apache, but more generally...

So, most of you know I've been working for another company (CCP Games) for the past about a month and half or something.  Anyway, they are completely a Microsoft shop.  Windows, Exchange, IIS, etc.  No Unix or Macs in site, really.  Even the artists work in Windows.  It's pretty different from what I've learned at Six Apart/Danga.  In fact, you could probably call it the opposite.

All of the Microsoft software seems designed to make things easier at the expense of making it harder to actually dig in and find the things you're looking for.  Notably, I am sorely missing things that might tell me what is going on.  Right now IIS is sitting in the background spinning trying to serve a page.  I'm getting no output.  I'm very unsure as to how to troubleshoot this.

Sometimes when I hit the page it says remote procedure call failed, and sometimes it spins.  Further investigation reveals that it is every other time.  Okay, dig out the Event Viewer, which is Microsoft's way to show what's going on.  Ah, in the System log, there's an error that happens when the page spins:

The application-specific permission settings do not grant Local Activation permission for the COM Server application with CLSID
{0C0A3666-30C9-11D0-8F20-00805F2CD064}
 to the user ...snip....  This security permission can be modified using the Component Services administrative tool.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

Well, if that isn't helpful, I don't know what is.  It wasn't doing this before I went on vacation.  Well, let's take a short trip down the Google path and see if I can find anything useful.  Well, I found some info.  Dug through the registry and found that the above is referring to the Machine Debug Manager.  I pulled up Component Services and am trying to figure out why it can't launch?  It seems like it should work, the various accounts there have access to launch it.

In further exploration, it seems like this is caused by ASPCache expiring.  I had downloaded a demo version because I couldn't find the full one on the internal site.  So now I need to actually take the time to dig it out of the network somewhere and get the real one installed.  Then hopefully things will work again.  Hopefully.

Back to work... exciting!