IIS Admin Service stuck at “Starting” status

Turns out I needed to install "IIS Manager for Remote Administration", which is discussed (and available for download) at http://www.iis.net/expand/IISManager. Why this is not part of the Windows 7 "Remote Administration Tools" I'm not sure. But after installing this I get the additional "connect" options.

Shortly: it might be a Delphi CGI application compiled with a Delphi version previous to D2007 last update (11.0.2902.10471). If it is the case you need the sources and a Delphi installation and recompile the application. Alternatively you should ask them just to recompile the app using a recent Delphi version.

(from http://forums.iis.net/t/1100323.aspx?PageIndex=2)

We found the problem which was causing our CGI to not respond on IIS 7. We actually narrowed the reason down to a line of code in the base class of all CGI applications written in Delphi (at least up to version 2005). This line of code is in the Run method of TCGIApplication and simply resets the standard input. On IIS 6 and prior, this line executes with no problem but on IIS 7 is raises an exception which causes the CGI application to crash and therefore not respond to requests. We are still investigating the side-effects of commenting this line out but that is our current solution. By removing this line, our CGI applications are now executing correctly on IIS 7.

Original author: Steven