I'd like to add some support to this. We're developing a rather hairy application under IIS. Essentially, it's a 15-year-old single-user DOS application that we're web-enabling. We're mucking around in this ancient code to put XML interfaces everywhere to its API so we can get to its internal structures. Perl is the glue binding all of this together.

Progress is slow, and failures tend to be spectacular as doing CGI and XML processing in C is No Fun (tm).

Sometimes the backend throws an "APPLICATION ERROR" (segfaults), sometimes it just...spins off and never quite stops running, sometimes it just stops. All of these cause IIS to have hissy fits and the development machines have to be rebooted completely to get rid of the rogue processes.

We've discovered that it's FAR easier to fire up Apache in a command-window as a development environment and then port to the IIS system for testing. We wind up with better code (portability!) and since Apache is a user process, its children can all be killed with the process monitor. Things go awry, we simply click in Apache's window, ^C, wait and restart it. If things bugger up completely, we kill Apache and then hunt down the errant process and kill it with the process monitor.