IIS7: A process serving application pool 'YYYYY' suffered a fatal communication error with the Windows Process Activation Service

Question

We\'re running a 32-bit Windows server 2008 with an IIS version of 7.
We\'re attempting to publish an asp.net 4.0 webapp and so far our attempts have only yielded a few

Answer 1

For me the problem was a configuration file that was missing an Element.

Answer 2

Make sure that each Application Pool in IIS, under Advanced Settings has Enable 32 bit Applications set to True

Answer 3

Debug Diagnostics Tool (DebugDiag) can be a lifesaver. It creates and analyze IIS crash dumps. I figured out my crash in minutes once I saw the call stack. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/919789

Answer 4

I was debugging the problem for the better part of the day and when I was close to burning the building I discovered the Process Monitor tool from Sysinternals.

Set it to monitor w3wp.exe and check last events before it exits after you fire a request in the browser. Hope that helps further readers.

Answer 5

When I had this problem, I installed 'Remote Tools for Visual Studio 2015' from MSDN. I attached my local VS to the server to debug.

I appreciate that some folks may not have the ability to either install on or access other servers, but I thought I'd throw it out there as an option.

Answer 6

I ran into this recently. Our organization restricts the accounts that run application pools to a select list of servers in Active Directory. I found that I had not added one of the machines hosting the application to the "Log On To" list for the account in AD.