I tried to help a colleague analyze an issue with an ASP.NET 1.1 application. The application was installed and worked properly on both an on-site server and a local mirror, in both cases under Windows 2000 Server with Windows 2000 SP3. The on-site administrator installed SP4 on the server, after which the application promptly stopped working properly: it didn't crash, it didn't register any errors what-so-ever and it didn't even time out, the client (in our case Internet Explorer) simply remained waiting for a response from the web server. My colleague attempted to install SP4 on the local server with the exact same result.

Oddly enough switching the application to ASP.NET 1.0 resolved the issue (but obviously is not an acceptable solution), so we tried re-registering ASP.NET 1.1 with aspnet_regiis.exe -i which had no effect. Obviously server restarts and iisreset had absolutely no effect either.

Eventually through trial and error we devised the following solution:

• Remove the .NET framework 1.0 and its service packs (so that only 1.1 remains)
• Reinstall .NET 1.0
• Make sure to have a cup of coffee next to the machine at this stage (very important!)
• Switch the application to 1.0
• Test the application
• Get another cup of coffee, make sure it's between 20cm and 1m from the development machine
• Switch the application back to 1.1
• Test again

This seems to have consistently resolved the issue with both local and on-site servers, but is obvious not a stable (nor acceptable) solution. It is also very non-scientific, because we haven't measured the volume of coffee in the mugs (mind you, neither was mine - I hardly ever drink coffee).

In short it's goddamn voodoo. I'm used to that kind of crap from Windows, but programming .NET has been impressively voodoo-free so far. I couldn't find anything similar with Google searches; has anyone ever seen (even better, solved) this issue before?