When you search for errors that might occur when logging into the Site Manager, a tool for maintaining the Microsoft Content Management Server (MCMS), you will get quite a decent list, but this time I have to offer a new one and, fortunately, its solution. After double-clicking the Site Manager icon the login dialog appeared, clicking the "OK" button resulted in an error message, stating a 500 server error. No further details.

Examining the web server log of the associated Site Manager website, revealed that the error occured when a file resstub.asp was called, obviously line 16 threw an error. Analyzing the HTTP traffic (you can easily do this with a tool like fiddler; just start it before your client application and get insight into the data flowing between the server and your client) confirmed this. Here I was able to read the error message, telling me that an object creation in the ASP code failed.

Line 16 in resstub.asp reads as follows:

Set pBinFiler = Server.CreateObject("AEBinFile.AEBinFile.1")

There was not much info I found about the object ("AEBinFile.AEBinFile.1"). I did a search on the local harddrive of the server where MCMS is installed for the actual DLL (AEBinFiler.dll) and I found it - twice. One location was the original place at \program files\microsoft content management server\server\iis_nr\system\marshalling\resstub.asp, the other place was the "bin" directory of another CMS website I deployed a few days ago. And that was obviously wrong! When I deployed that website the installer registered this other DLL in the new website's "bin" directory, thus causing the HTTP 500 error.

The problem was solved by issuing a

regsvr32 AEBinFiler.dll

in the original MCMS bin directory.