I installed PHP on my Windows XP system using the Web Platform Installer (and probably somewhere choose to use ‘FastCGI’ as I had read this was the preferred way.) Under IIS 7.0, a simple PHP script produced an error "500.0 Internal Server Error’; detailed underneath as an error in the FastCGI Module. The Trace-log file of IIS confirmed this and added ‘Not a valid win32 application’.
Although I spent hours searching (and noted lots of people have a problem ‘something like this’), I can’t find a solution or even a way to go forward. I would be most grateful for a hint on how to proceed.
Here is what I did so far: On some forum I found the suggestion to use Dependency Walker on the file php-cgi.exe and sure enough it found some files missing. First, some C++ libraries; this issue I solved using a download from Microsoft.
The error remained the same, though, and Dependency Walker is still missing two files: wer.dll and ieshims.dll. I don’t know how to repair this (downloading separate dll’s doesn’t seem a good idea) and in many forum answers to the same problem (missing these two particular files when using Dependency walker) are given the advice that this is a ‘fake’ problem which should be ignored.
Meanwhile, I’ve been looking for an answer to this question: when I execute php-cgi.exe directly (I mean: double-clicking it with windows explorer) it gives the error “Not a valid win32 application”. Is it supposed to do that? And if not, how could I proceed? (By the way: php-win.exe gives the same error)
And if the error occurring when I directly execute php-cgi.exe is nothing to worry about - what, then, could be the problem?
if all u want is a local web server, use something like wamp or xamp. much easier to install and comes with selectable extensions.
I don’t use IIS 6 anymore, but it’s easy on IIS 7 You just install the new version and configure you website to run on the new version and you can leave the old version in place and switch back to them if needed.