Im a developer with very limited knowledge of IIS7 administration. Today when attempting to open the IIS instance via the IIS admin GUI i received a message that reads (paraphrased):
"There was an error trying to connect. Do you want to retype your credentials.
Error: applicationHost file is malformed xml" – Or similar.
Looking at applicationHost.config file I see that it is empty. Any ideas how I restore this file, or what I can add to it to restore it to its default state?
Cheers, Chris.
Best Answer
If this is Windows Vista and have a recent backup of your whole machine, you could try to restore the file using the Backup and Restore Center.
The author of the following blog post had the same problem: My Web Server's Dead - Corrupt applicationHost.config
If you just need a copy of the content of that file (for Windows Vista), I copied the XML text from a clean Vista installation and put a ZIP file you can download here. I guess you'll have to stop the IIS service before you access the file.