IIS denies access to local .com folders

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From: Marco De Vitis (starless_at_spin.it)
Date: 01/21/05 

Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2005 12:52:46 +0100

Hello,
I noticed a strange problem with IIS on my WinXP Pro SP2 machine.

In my web server's directories I have some folders named like
"www.site1.com", "www.site2.it", which contain the actual files of the
corresponding web sites I manage.

So I used to access them by typing URLs such as
http://localhost/www.site1.com/ for folders contained in wwwroot, or
http://localhost/mydata/www.site2.it/ when contained in the "mydata"
virtual directory.
I'm absolutely sure this worked fine for years.

But now, IIS denies access to folders whose name ends with ".com". When
the folder is in a virtual directory, I'm asked for authentication and
then denied access (the error page talks about ACLs, but I have no ACLs on
that virtual directory, as it resides on a FAT32 partition); when it's in
wwwroot, I'm not asked for authentication, and I immediately get an error
page telling instead that execution is not allowed.
Everything works fine, instead, if I rename the folders to make them end
in ".it" or anything else... but the problem remains if I use ".exe".

So it seems like a dumb security measure, I suppose recently introduced
with some WinXP upgrade.
Is there a way to deactivate it? It looks very stupid to me... the server
should know if it's serving a directory or a file... and then I don't see
why it doesn't block access to .bat and .vbs folders, too. 8-/

Thanks in advance. 

-- 
Ciao,
  Marco.
..."The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway", Genesis 1974

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