This was one of those funny errors, or at least I thought so.
I inherited a site (no, not the MSXML ecommerce one) which uses forms authentication for an administrative directory. That's the only forms-based authentication in use in the company. I personally just never used forms authentication, though I think its pretty cool.
A user was getting a runtime error when she tried to enter the directory.
Parser Error Message: It is an error to use a section registered as allowDefinition='MachineToApplication' beyond application level. This error can be caused by a virtual directory not being configured as an application in IIS.
Being in the middle of migrating a bunch of sites I thought maybe I had turned off the virtual directory properties of the folder, so I turned them back on only to then get a "...ASCX maps to another application" error.
Venkat Chilakala saved the day (just don't make me say his name.) Thanks, Venkat!
So the funny error part of this incident, was that when I was dragging select site folders to copy to the W2K3 server I had a mouse fart or something and a bunch of root directory files were copied into a subfolder, resulting in 2 web.config files. Damn human element!
From: Venkat Chilakala (venkat_chilakala@microsoft.com)
Subject: RE: security settings
Newsgroups: microsoft.public.dotnet.framework.aspnet
Date: 2001-09-04 10:18:08 PST
You can have only ONE authentication tag per application. The follwoing error is caused because you have 2 authentication tags in different directories of a single asp(or asp.net) application.
Hope that helps.
Thanks
Venkat Chilakala