On a Windows 2003 server machine, I had to re-install IIS6; after re-installation, I added a few websites that were created prior to the re-installation back, and suddenly all the websites were automatically flagged as “Stopped”. Tried to start one of them, and got this dreadful error “You have been denied access to this machine.” I Googled this error directly and returned no much useful information except that someone suggested looking into the Windows Event Log; so I did and the underline error was like “Cannot register the URL prefix ‘http://*:80/’ for site..”

Searching the latter error message has yielded a few more useful postings about the issue. I followed the one posted at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/890015 and resolved the problem by doing these steps:

1. Start -> Run -> Regedit
2. Browsed to Hkey_Local_Machine\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Http\Parameters\ListenOnlyList
3. There were three entries under this subkey, 0.0.0.0, 127.0.0.1:80, and 127.0.0.1:8080
4. Returned to command line and run this command: net stop http
5. Went back to registry, and removed from the ListenOnlyList all entries except 0.0.0.0
6. Restarted http services by executing command: net start http
7. Returned to IIS6 and started the website; this time, the site was started successfully.