Well, I’ve been trying to setup the External Collaboration Toolkit.  All of the instructions tell how to do it as a standalone SharePoint install, but I am trying to get it setup in a SharePoint farm.  One of the steps in the instructions is to setup ADAM to act as the authentication for external users.  The communications with ADAM need to be SSL encrypted.  So, I set it up the way the instructions say and went through the portion that ensures that the UserID that runs the ADAM service has access to the SSL Certificates. 

That’s when I must have went wrong.  Somehow, I removed access to the SSL Certificates from the service that runs the IIS Admin service.  So, when I rebooted, IIS would not start.  The only thing that was in the event log was:

Handle is invalid

Real helpful, huh?

Luckily, I was able to find Microsoft KB Article #278381.  The basic thing is that I needed to reset the security on the SSL Certificates.  Below is an explaination:

The MachineKeys are at the following location:
All Users Profile\Application Data\Microsoft\Crypto\RSA

The following settings are the default permissions for the MachineKeys folder:

To view the special permissions for the Everyone group, right-click the MachineKeys folder, click Advanced on the Security tab, and then click View/Edit. The permissions consist of the following permissions:

1. List Folder/Read Data
2. Read Attributes
3. Read Extended Attributes
4. Create Files/Write Data
5. Create Folders/Append Data
6. Write Attributes
7. Write Extended Attributes
8. Read Permissions

Select the Reset Permissions on all Child objects and enable propagation of inheritable permissions check box.