Internet Information Services (IIS) worker processes serve an application pool and can be in a starting, running, stopping, or unknown state. In IIS 7, worker processes are managed by WAS (the Windows Process Activation Service). If a worker process fails to respond, it may be recycled by WAS.

Check worker process initialization failure

If a worker process fails to initialize, check the event log message for a specific error number included in the message. This error number will be different from the Event ID. To do this, see the following steps.

Check for a specific error number

To check for a specific error number:

• In the Event Viewer, select the event that you received.

• Click the Details tab, then Friendly View.

• If a specific error number is available, the words Binary data: should appear.

• Below In Words, note the number after the colon.

Find out more about a specific error number

To learn more about a specific error number:

• Download the Err.exe utility from the Microsoft Exchange Server Error Code Look-up page.

• Open an elevated Command Prompt window. Click Start, point to All Programs, click Accessories, right-click Command Prompt, and then click Run as administrator.

• At the command prompt, navigate to the directory where you downloaded Err.exe. For example, if you downloaded Err.exe to C:\Err, type cd C:\Err.

• Type err errornumber to obtain more information about the error. For example, if the specific error number is 80070005, type err 80070005.

• In the example in Step 4, the error resolves to ERROR_ACCESS_DENIED, so your next step would be to check permissions related to the worker process.