The service cannot accept control messages at this time

Question

I just stopped an Application Pool in IIS. When trying to start it, IIS complains that,

The service cannot accept control messages at this time. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80080425).

What gives? Whence did this error come?

Looking at the Event Viewer > System shows these warnings:

A worker process '1456' serving application pool 'MyAppPool' failed to stop a listener channel for protocol 'http' in the allotted time. The data field contains the error number.

A process serving application pool 'MyAppPool' suffered a fatal communication error with the Windows Process Activation Service. The process id was '10592'. The data field contains the error number.

A process serving application pool 'MyAppPool' exceeded time limits during shut down. The process id was '10516'.

This resolved itself after about 5-minutes, at which point we tried to restart the website, and received:

The World Wide Web Publish Service (W3SVC) is stopped. Web sites cannot be started unless the World Wide Web Publishing Service (W3SVC) is running.

So, we started the W3SVC service, and then we could start our website.

Solution 1

This helped me: just wait about a minute or two.

Wait a few minutes, then retry your operation.

Ref: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms833805.aspx

Solution 2

The error message could result due to the following reason:

1. The service associated with Credential Manager does not start.
2. Some files associated with the application have gone corrupt.

Please follow the steps mentioned below to resolve the issue:

Method 1:

1. Click on the “Start”
2. In the text box that reads “Search Program and Files” type “Services”
3. Right click on “Services” and select “Run as Administrator”
4. In the Services Window, look for Credential Manager Service and “Stop” it.
5. Restart the computer and “Start” the Credential Manager Service and set it to “Automatic”.
6. Restart the computer and it should work fine.

Method 2: 1. Run System File Checker. Refer to the link mentioned below for additional information: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929833

Solution 3

In my case, the VS debugger was attached to the w3wp process. After detaching the debugger, I was able to restart the Application Pool

Solution 4

I stopped the IIS Worker Process (in task manager), and then started the IIS again. It worked.

Solution 5

I killed related w3wp.exe (on a friends' advise) at task manager and it worked.

Note: Use at your own risk. Be careful picking which one to kill.

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Comments

[Zeeshan]

Method 1 worked for me on Windows 10. Did not need to restart the computer.

[Nick]

Method 1 worked for me on Windows Server 2012 R2 without the need to restart the machine

[jpaugh]

Why would you need to stop one service (step 4) before stopping the whole OS (step 5)? In my case, simply restarting the Credential Manager was enough.

[jpaugh]

How is the Credential Manager related to IIS? (I am surprised to find that restarting the Credential Manager service did indeed allow me to start the app pool.)

[sfarbota]

Visual Studio Remote Debugger was the issue for me as well.

[Lars Peter Larsen]

Same for me. Hint to find the PID of the Application Pool: Select the servername in IIS manager and then "Worker Processes" is found in the IIS-section...

[Daniel Hursan]

I'm a software developer, dealing with this often. I can't just wait a minute or two.

[neminem]

Confirmed, I had waited a minute and was still getting that error, which made me nervous and brought me here. Just had to wait a couple minutes longer than I had.