Consider the following scenario. You have an Internet Information Services (IIS) 6.0 web server running on Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2. The Microsoft update KB982666 and/or Microsoft update KB973917 gets installed on the server. After installing KB98266 and/or KB973917, the IIS 6.0 application pools cannot start up successfully. An inspection of the event logs show that the IIS worker processes are terminating unexpectedly, showing event messages similar to the following:
Event Type: Warning
Event Source: W3SVC
Event Category: None
Event ID: 1009
Date: 12/9/2009
Time: 10:55:01 AM
User: N/A
Computer: WEBSERVER01
Description:
A process serving application pool 'DefaultAppPool' terminated unexpectedly. The process id was '1234'.
The process exit code was '0xffffffff'.
In some cases, the IIS application pool(s) are eventually disabled by the Rapid Fail Protection feature. Users who try browsing to the web sites hosted on the server may complain that the web sites are unavailable and cannot be accessed.