I've had some problems with my local install of IIS at home.  I've been getting this error:

The server failed to load application '/LM/W3SVC'. The error was 'The specified metadata was not found.'.

After some serious googling, lots of different KB articles talking about IWAM syncing, dcom problems and other unsuccessful fixes I decided to go with an old stand by; uninstall, reboot, reinstall.  That seemed to do the trick.

I'm still on WinXP Pro, and as with most web developers I have a number of virtual directories under IIS.  This time around I decided to create multiple websites and swap them out as I do development.  The tool I'm using to make this dead simple is EasyIIS.

I pulled down backup of my blog to set it up locally, created a new website in EasyIIS and typed in my full path: e:\websites\theQueue.net\, clicked OK, then Navigate (it's a button in EasyIIS that does what it says).  I can't describe how thrilled I was to see:

The path '/blog/App_GlobalResources/' maps to a directory outside this application, which is not supported.

That trailing slash caused all my problems.