App pool disabled after installing KB973917. Workerprocess crashing, logging event with exit code ‘0xffffffff’

After installing KB973917 your IIS 6.0 server started experiencing issues.

Why does this happen?

Earlier installation of Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2 on the server did not complete successfully, leaving some of the IIS .dlls at the Service Pack 1 level while bringing others up to the Service Pack 2 level. The IIS services had been able to run successfully even with that file mismatch in place. However, the installation of the KB973917 update exposes this pre-existing file mismatch environment to the degree that IIS is now unable to function properly.

How to fix it?

First of all open your inetsrv folder ‘run>inetsrv’ check for version of dll such as iisadmin.dll, w3core.dll.

If you are on 2003 Sp2 and see the file version anything less than 3959 (last four digits) then you might be the victim.

To be extra sure check your event logs to see if you are logging the following events in system log,

Event Type: Warning

Event Source: W3SVC

Event Category: None

Event ID: 1009

Date: 12/9/2009

Time: 10:55:01 AM

User: N/A

Computer: WEBSERVER01

Description:

A process serving application pool 'DefaultAppPool' terminated unexpectedly. The process id was '1234'.

The process exit code was '0xffffffff'

 

If yes reinstall SP2. This will replace older dll in inetsrv with the latest versions.

Refer Kb for more information: https://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=2009746

Hope this helped you in some way