How to make this a little bit easier during development...

At first I thought that the only way to unlock a ASP component DLL was to use the MMC. There is however a better way.

Create a new start menu shortcut:

c:\windows\system\inetsrv\pws.exe /stop /y

It is the /y that does the trick. Not only will it stop PWS, as does the stop button in the Personal Web Manager, but it will also unload the Inetinfo.exe process from memory, unlocking any locked ASP component library DLL's.

This way you can compile your ASP component with Delphi, start your web application and use the just created shortcut to unload the DLL from memory, allowing you to recompile from Delphi without rebooting your computer. A big time saver!

C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\inetsrv\inetinfo.exe -e w3svc will restart PWS

Unlocking Active Server Library DLL's under Windows NT

Type net stop iisadmin /y to shutdown the parent service of IIS, IIS Admin. This will also shut down FTP, STMP, and any other services that are children of IIS Admin. It will unload the inetinfo.exe process from memory. If you type only net stop w3svc, to unload just the Web server, inetinfo.exe will not be unloaded.

Type net start w3svc to restart the Web server.