Cingular Manager causes InetInfo to core dump.

A few weeks ago, I got the Cingular BroadbandConnect service for my laptop.  This gives me high-speed wireless on my laptop from pretty much anywhere.  It’s pretty great.

EXCEPT!

Except that it caused IIS (inetinfo.exe) to die a horrible and confusing death whenever I tried to run an ASP.NET page. 

Symptoms:

• Whenever I tried to open a VS2003 web project, it would hang while loading.
  
• Whenever I tried to hit an ASP.NET page hosted in IIS, I’d hear the sound of a Windows alert dialog box but couldn’t see a message box anywhere.  It almost goes without saying that the asp.net page didn’t work at all. 
  
• Nothing in the event logs

Richard Hale Shaw suggested that this sounded like the old DCOM/COM+ days where someone would write an app that showed a message box that couldn’t appear because the user hosting the process didn’t have a Windows session.

So, I went into the Windows Service configuration for IISAdmin and Inetinfo, and checked “allow process to interact with desktop”.  I re-ran the asp.net app and this time, I saw the error message.  The error said that inetinfo.exe encountered a problem and crashed.  It then asked if I wanted to write a core dump file to c:windowstempcoredmp.  I said, yes and the core dump didn’t say much of interest.

This time I got a message in the event log: “Faulting application inetinfo.exe, version 5.1.2600.2180, faulting module bmnet.dll, version 2.1.2.3101, fault address 0x000060d0.“

A quick google search turned up a knowledge base article: kb910435

Turned out that it was the accelerator in the Cingular Connection Manager client.  I uninstalled the accelerator per the instructions in KB910435 and rebooted. 

Everything seem to be back to normal.

-Ben