Today while accessing my default port 80 website in browser, I was greeted with “Internet Explorer cannot display the page” message. To this while inspecting in Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager, I found the Default site to be in stop state. So as any other geek would do, I pressed the “start” button. But booom: the site didn’t start up and gave a bizarre dialog box saying
The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process (Exception from: hresult 0x80070020)
If you try to figure this thing out by yourself (i.e. without using any search engine), I bet you would never be able to find the culprit. Thanks to Google and peer geeks who shared the same issue, I was finally able to get the site up again.
And guess who the culprit was: SKYPE !!!
Shocked !!? Well at least I was when I first came to know about it. After all what the hell does skype has to do with default site’s working in IIS, totally didn’t make any connection or sense to me initially.
The thing is, by default skype tries to use port 80 for its functioning, if port 80 is not already used by some other application. Now in most cases for above error, some how skype found port 80 free and so started using it. And now when you try to start your website at port 80, poor guy cannot function as the port is already in use; simple as that.
Solution (If you have skype running):
Sign-out of your skype, hit “quit” from its running instance available through system tray icon, and then try starting the default website in IIS manager.
Tip: If you want to get more information on port bindings for a system, fire up the command “NETSTAT -ano” in your command prompt.
It worked for me and mostly would work for you as well !!
Purnil Soni's TechnologyZen 