IIS: Services Fail to Start with Event ID 7023

After you restart your server that is running Internet Information Server (IIS) 4.0 or Internet Information Services (IIS) 5.0, services such as the World Wide Web Publishing Service, the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) Service, and the FTP Publishing Service may not start. In your Event Viewer system log, you may see a corresponding error message similar to the following for each service that did not successfully start:
-or- -or- -or-
-or- -or-

If you try to manually start the service from the Services applet in Administrative Tools, you may receive one of the following error messages: -or- -or- If you try to start the services from the command prompt, you receive one of the following error messages: -or- -or-

This problem may occur if the Microsoft Distributed Transaction Coordinator (MSDTC) has been configured to use a certain range of ports for incoming requests, but the range that has been specified is not large enough.

Important This section, method, or task contains steps that tell you how to modify the registry. However, serious problems might occur if you modify the registry incorrectly. Therefore, make sure that you follow these steps carefully. For added protection, back up the registry before you modify it. Then, you can restore the registry if a problem occurs. For more information about how to back up and restore the registry, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
If you do not have to specify which ports MSDTC uses, you can resolve this problem by deleting the following registry key:

1. Click Start, click Run, type regedt32 in the Open box, and then click OK. This starts Registry Editor.
2. In Registry Editor, expand HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE.
3. Under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, double-click Software, double-click Microsoft, and then double-click Rpc.
4. Under RPC, select Internet.
5. On the Edit menu, click Delete to delete the key.
6. On the File menu, click Exit to close Registry Editor.
7. Click Start, and then click Shut Down. Select Restart in the list, and then click OK to restart the computer.

If you must control which ports MSDTC dynamically allocates for incoming communication, you must increase the number of ports that are specified under that registry key:

1. Click Start, click Run, type regedt32 in the Open box, and then click OK. This starts Registry Editor.
2. In Registry Editor, expand HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE.
3. Under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, double-click Software, double-click Microsoft, and then double-click Rpc.
4. Under RPC, select Internet.
5. In the right pane, double-click Ports.
6. In the Multi-String Editor dialog box, increase the range of specified ports. For example, if the current range is from 10000-15000, which allocates 5,000 ports, you can change the range to 10000-20000 to allocate 10,000 ports.For additional information, click the article number below to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
   250367  (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/250367/EN-US/ ) INFO: Configuring Microsoft Distributed Transaction Coordinator (DTC) to Work Through a Firewall
7. On the File menu, click Exit to close Registry Editor.
8. Click Start, and then click Shut Down. Select Restart in the list, and then click OK to restart the computer.

By default, the Internet key and its values under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Rpc do not appear in the registry. If this key exists, it was probably added to specify the ports that the MSDTC allocates. This is most frequently done to permit MSDTC to work through a firewall.