Illegal operation attempted on a registry key that has been marked for deletion - only in IE

Question

I have a web application that throws the following error when running in IE:

Illegal operation attempted on a registry key that has been marked for deletion

It works fine in Chrome. Unfortunately this is a production deployment and I do not have access to see any more detailed information on the error.

I have read some information related to this error message here

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/90e22b43-e24f-44be-9345-ecbade0b32c9/urgent-comexception-illegal-operation-attempted-on-a-registry-key-that-has-been-marked-for?forum=commserver2007

and here

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/distributedservices/archive/2009/11/06/a-com-server-application-may-stop-working-on-windows-server-2008.aspx

Here is the Windows Event log which is consistent with what is described in those 2 links:

But it boggles me as to why this would only be occurring when using IE. Any ideas?

Answer 1

The error seems to be caused by either a bug or memory leak related to COM+. Restarting the Application Pool or restarting IIS should fix the issue. Be warned that it might crop up again out of the blue, so consider restarting your app pool on a scheduled basis.

It is unlikely that the error is browser related. It is possible the app was working in Chrome due to caching. Or perhaps production has multiple servers, and Chrome was hitting a good server, and IE was hitting the bad sever.