MOSS IIS Not Expanding, Workaround

Have you ever tried to expand the IIS Manager from one of your MOSS Servers and you get the error; The Path Specified cannot be used at this time.

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Then where you should see all of your IIS Virtual Directories , Application Pools, and Web Service Settings you see nothing at all.

It is frustrating I know.. An easy way to get IIS to expand again is to kill the OWSTIMER.EXE Process in the Task Manager, close the IIS Manager window and reopen it. IIS will expand in this new window without error.

Don’t worry about killing the OWSTIMER. The service will restart itself when SharePoint kicks off the next timer process. Previous to this fix I did an iisreset, which will work but it will also stop your IIS Applications.