You cannot apply an OWA Web publishing rule that redirects users who connect to the root of the OWA Web site to an internal folder by using ISA Server 2006

You configure a Microsoft Office Outlook Web Access (OWA) Web publishing rule to redirect users who connect to the root of the OWA Web site to an internal folder. For example, you redirect users to the /Exchange folder. Then, you experience the following symptoms, depending on the version of Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration Server (ISA) 2006 that you use.

ISA Server 2006, Standard Edition

When you apply the OWA Web publishing rule, you receive an error message that resembles the following:Additionally, if you stop the Microsoft Firewall service, you cannot restart it.

ISA Server 2006, Enterprise Edition

After you apply the OWA Web publishing rule, the following events are logged in the Application log:

• Event Type: Error
  Event Source: Microsoft ISA Server Web Proxy
  Event Category: None
  Event ID: 21177
  Computer: ComputerName
  Description:
  The Web filter Link Translation Filter failed to reload its configuration. If you recently applied changes to the configuration, verify that these changes are configured properly.

• Event Type: Error
  Event Source: Microsoft ISA Server Web Proxy
  Event Category: None
  Event ID: 21209
  Computer: ComputerName
  Description:
  The ISA Server configuration agent was unable to upload the configuration to the ISA Server services. This could be due to a corrupt configuration. The ISA Server configuration agent is reverting the configuration back to the last known configuration. The service that failed to load the configuration is: fwsrv.

Note This problem affects OWA Web publishing rules that are created in ISA Server 2006. After you upgrade to ISA Server 2006, the problem may also affect rules that were first created in ISA Server 2004.

This problem occurs if the following conditions are true:

• The external path that is specified in the OWA Web publishing rule is “/.” Be aware that the "/" is used without quotation marks.
• The internal path that is specified in the OWA Web publishing rule is URL-encoded. Characters that are URL-encoded are replaced by a percent sign (%) that is followed by a particular number.
• Link translation is enabled for the OWA Web publishing rule.

To resolve this problem, install the update that is described in the following article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

For more information about publishing Microsoft Exchange Server together with ISA Server 2006, visit the following Microsoft Web site: