Web page Error - "The system cannot find the file specified" Error

[Praveen Chandra]

All,
We have a web application and are facing a strange problem at one of our
customer's intranet site. When people try to access certain web pages
(.asp), they are getting "HTTP 500 - Internal server error (Page cannot be
displayed)". We tried removing the "Show friendly HTTP error messages" from
the browser and got "The system cannot find the file specified" error. We
verified the IIS logs of the same request it showed up as "HTTP 200"
successful. This is a very random behavior and doesn't happen always.
Please let us know if someone has any idea about what is the problem.
Following the information about the IE version and IIS version.

Client:
Internet Explorer - 6.0.2800.1106
Updated Versions: SP1; Q291940; Q330994; Q822925;
Q832894; Q837009; Q867801; Q833989;
Server:
Microsoft Windows 2000
5.00.2195
Service Pack 4
IIS - 5.0

Thanks,
Praveen.

 

[Ken Schaefer]

Anything in the Windows Event Logs? Please post event ID, source and
description.

Thanks

Cheers
Ken

 

[Praveen Chandra]

Ken,
Thanks for the reply. I checked the Event log, but there is nothing in
the event log also.

Thanks,
Praveen.

 

[Ken Schaefer]

Wait a minute.

You are saying that the user is seeing 500 Internal Server Error, but IIS is
logging 200 OK? Are you sure about that?

Cheers
Ken

 

[Praveen Chandra]

That's right, IIS records "200" status for the operation and all code
written in the asp is executed correctly. We have even tried monitoring the
network traffic between the browser and IIS and found that IIS returns
"500 - The system cannot find the file specified".

The above page was doing a "Response.Redirect ()" at the end of execution,
we are able to reduce the frequency of this issue by making the redirect
from the client side "location.href =url ". But that did not explain why it
is happening!

We have earlier seen similar issue with the IIS response (system cannot find
the file specified) when the URL (querystring) of page is abnormally long.
So thinking it is an issue with the size of the http request, we have been
trying to reduce the size of cookies (session based) and querystrings used
for the page. All of this only helped us to reduce the frequency of
occurring, but did not fix the issue.

Hope this information helps!

Thanks,
Praveen.