We have an ASP.Net 3.5 web site running on IIS6. The network people changed the IP address of the mail server and emails sent from this site stopped working. We found some code (developed by devs no longer at the company) where the IP address of the mail server was hard coded, changed it, recompiled, then deployed to the local machine.

Back on the server, we copied the entire web site to another folder as backup, then copied the newly compiled site onto the server, stopped and started the site in IIS Manager in MMC. All we got was a cryptic error. We set customErrors mode to RemoteOnly and stopped/started the site and browsed to the site from the server. The message was still cryptic that customErrors needed to be set.

We then copied the original files back into the application folder and tried browsing to the site. The error this time was that web.config was not accessible. What the crap? Just copying files. (turns out, yes...when copying to a folder outside the site hierarchy, the files get the rights of the new folder).

We've tried everything, even giving full rights to the full folder hierarchy to everything IIS and the site use, restarted IIS, rebooted server. We're totally stumped and need some help urgently.

Questions: 1) How do we get decent error message out of this thing? We've tried all the mode settings of customErrors with no luck. I don't like the risk of installing Elmah or something else at this point.

2) What permissions do we need for this thing to run? We've tried everything we can think of.

Thanks