Recently I installed Oracle and the required Microsoft Loopback Adaptor, which worked fine. However, this seems to have screwed up IIS (or at least its interaction with Visual Studio) somehow. I can’t connect to localhost or 127.0.0.1 anymore, and I can’t even open a web project in Visual Studio 2008 (which used to work fine), getting the error “The local IIS URL http://localhost/MyProject specified for the Web project MyProject has not been configured. In order to open this project the virtual directory needs to be configured. Would you like to create this directory now?” I click yes, then it gives an error that it “could not find the server http://localhost on the current machine”.
IIS is running and I can connect to the default IIS website and other contents of inetput/wwwroot on localhost:1122.
I tried to disable the loopback adaptor and comment out the line I needed to add to hosts to get Oracle working, and while this has stopped Oracle from working, it hasn’t helped with IIS/localhost.
edit: this turned out to be fixed by restoring the project from a backup, so it must have been an issue with the project itself of some sort.
Ok, I finally managed to get this working by deleting the project and restoring from a backup. I guess the project configuration had somehow become screwed up in such a way as to cause the error I got, rather than there being a problem with IIS itself. Sorry for the false alarm.