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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-17T20:58:00+00:00

I have a curious problem. A 64-bit Windows 7 Pro box has IIS 7.5/64

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I have a curious problem.

A 64-bit Windows 7 Pro box has IIS 7.5/64 installed. An application pool has been configured to enable 32-bit applications, and a site has been created using this application pool. However, when the worker process for the site starts, it is always started as a 64-bit process. The “bitness” of the app pool is evidenced in Task Manager, which has no “*32” tag with the w3wp.exe process name.

I’ve tried deleting and recreating the application pool, creating a new application pool, and re-registering the 32-bit framework, restarting IIS each time, all to no avail. I’m sure I’m overlooking something trivial, in “forest for the trees” mode, so a push in the right direction to clear up the fog would be appreciated.

I’ve read through several posts on issues like this, but most center on ensuring the app pool is configured to “Enable 32-bit apps,” which was one of the first steps taken.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Well, after a couple of days of head scratching, I finally solved this problem.

    After verifying through the IIS management tool that each application pool on the box had “Enable 32-bit Applications” explicitly set to True, I went into the machine’s applicationHost.config, and those same pools had this property set to False. I manually edited these entries to True, restarted IIS, then re-registered the 32-bit version of ASP.NET, and the machine now operates properly.

    Thanks for the suggestions. I’m not entirely why the IIS admin tool was essentially lying to me about the Enable 32 bit app setting, but oh, well… 🙂

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