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Ok, so that may sound a bit cataclysmic, but at least in many cases this is true. I have done a lot of searching but not found a great thread that has it simply stated like this.

In fact, the KB article from MS titles this...

IIS settings are missing after you run Sysprep with the -nosidgen command-line switch ... which apparently means ... "Don't use Sysprep with IIS... we will kill it".

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/827385

Please tell me I'm wrong and I missed something key. But I've been down all of the normal solutions:

Background I had a webserver joined to a simple local AD. I needed it replicated, so we imaged it from a backup server and ran sysprep with the OOBE and generalize options. I had to remove it from the domain, rename the machine, restart, and rejoin back to the domain. That all worked fine. Also, after uninstalling IIS and reinstalling it works as well. The problem is... that's a lot of work when you've got a production node with a lot of website nodes to deal with that all need testing before putting back into production.

If nothing else, maybe this post will help you share your pain :).

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ebol2000
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    I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because I sympathise with your pain but there's no actionable question to answer here. While its poorly written, you've already found the "it hurts when I do this... so don't do it then!" KB article from Microsoft. – Rob Moir Feb 09 '16 at 18:24
  • I see your point... perhaps I should have titled this "how can I avoid Sysprep from destroying IIS"... because I'm still hopeful there is some missing KB article or something. I'm still having a hard time digesting that there seems no way to clone a webserver once configured so that it can be scaled up. Also I wish I had found a discussion like this one as it would have saved me a lot of time. – ebol2000 Feb 09 '16 at 22:39
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    There are a number of other ways to achieve this: 1. Export/import the IIS configuration and application pools with appcmd. 2. Used IIS Shared Configuration to "export/import" the configuration. You could use either method with Sysprep by exporting on the source server pre-Sysprep and importing on the destination server post-Sysprep. – joeqwerty Feb 09 '16 at 22:49
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    @joeqwerty, I tried this but it did not help. My problem seems to stem from the underlying private key used to encrypt sensitive data such as passwords, etc. That is why I was hopeful the clearing out the application.config configProtectedData element was on the right track... but nothing was ever regenerated and I still got the same errors. In the end, I determined it was easier in my case to just rebuild the server from scratch. – ebol2000 Feb 10 '16 at 19:46

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