IIS – Resolving ‘Access is Denied’ Error When Starting Web Management Service

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I am trying to set up Web Deploy on an IIS 10 server running on Windows Server 2019. The Web Management Service must be running in order for this to occur, but it will not start.

I installed the Windows feature and can see the appropriate Windows service in service management. Unfortunately, when I try to start either through Service Manager or IIS's management tool, it fails. The Windows application event logs contain the following error:

The Web Management Service service terminated with the following service-specific error: Access is denied.

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And… that's it.

Here's my IIS Management Studio screen:
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The closest I've been able to find to an answer is this, which didn't help.

Best Answer

The Web Management Service will fail to start with a "Code 5" error in the console and an "Access Denied" event in the Windows security logs if you have the Block untrusted fonts policy enabled. This is a known issue that has been fixed as of build 1903.

Here's the Microsoft Tech Community post from a Microsoft support escalation engineer that solved this exact problem for me. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/iis-support-blog/wmsvc-web-management-service-failing-to-start-with-quot-access/ba-p/770603

It is likely that the block untrusted fonts setting is enabled on your server either by registry, local policy, or domain-based group policy. In my environment, I created a policy that only applies to Windows Server 2019 machines and disabled the following setting:

Computer Settings > Administrative Templates > System > Mitigation Settings > Untrusted Font Blocking

After running gpupdate and rebooting, the service started successfully.

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