Web-server – IIS 6 + ASP.NET web service – DW20 and stackoverflow exception

Consider an ASP.NET SOAP web service that starts up fine, but craters hard when receiving its first hit.

Please note that this is deployment works in the Test environment, but not in the PreProd environment. Both are Windows 2003 SP3 + IIS 6 + ASP.NET 3.5. All up-to-date.

The behaviour that we're seeing is:

• restart the site & app pool
• the app pool is configured to run under Network Service.
• browsing to the .asmx and .wsdl responds normally, as expected.
• send a normal well-formed SOAP request / normal payload to the web service
• 100% CPU usage
• after 5 seconds, the page request / site returns "Service Unavailable"
• no entry is created in the IIS log file (i.e. c:\windows\system32\logfiles\W3C-foo)
• the app pool ends up being stopped

The processes that hit the CPU hard are dw20.exe. I am unsure why Dr Watson is involved here.

Event Log shows an ASP.NET Runtime error:

Task Manager:

Event log text:

EventType clr20r3, P1 w3wp.exe, P2
6.0.3790.3959, P3 45d6968e, P4 errormanagement, P5 1.0.0.0, P6
4b86a13f, P7 24, P8 0, P9
system.stackoverflowexception, P10
NIL.

Questions

Any thoughts on what this system.stackoverflow exception might be? Given that the code is the same between environments, might it be a payload problem? Could it be a configuration issue? You can see the name of my .NET assembly there in the exception message: "ErrorManagement"