Turn off IE ESC, a very unusual work around to Error 10016 on Windows 2008 R2

You will find countless posts on Internet about the Error messages 10016 on Windows 2008 R2, mostly related to the installation of Sharepoint and/or the IIS WAMREG application.

In example Wictor Wilén has published one of such posts, but you may find truly find tens of similar posts, even KBs on Microsoft support website all pointing you to try to change registry settings or DCOM configurations.

Today, for the previous 8 hours, I dealt with this very same error message 10016, I was basically trying to instance an object from some server side vbscript in an asp page, and there was no way that I was able to make it work.

To make it clear, I was just trying with absolute no joy to execute something like this:

<%
    Set MyObject = Server.CreateObject("MyCOMComponent.MyClass.1")
%>

I was only able to get something like this on the system event log:

The application-specific permission settings do not grant Local Activation permission for the COM Server application with CLSID
{XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXX}
and APPID
{YYYYYYYY-YYYY-YYYY-YYYY-YYYYYYYYYYYY}
to the user COMPANY\myUser SID (S-Z-Z-ZZ-ZZZZZZZZZZ-ZZZZZZZZZ-ZZZZZZZZZZ-ZZZZ) from address LocalHost (Using LRPC). This security permission can be modified using the Component Services administrative tool.

I truly tried everything I found on the Internet related to 10016, and much more I managed to conceive myself, I even picked the brain of 4 of my brilliant officemates, but we got nowhere.

I was almost tempted to give up for the day, when serendipity struck gold: instead of trying to browse the asp page from the browser on the server, I tried with the browser on my workstation, and everything worked absolutely fine.

I had just to turn off the IE ESC (Internet Explorer Enhanced Security Configuration) from the Security Information summary on Server Manager, to see the asp page starting to work also on the server.

Amazingly, it seems that turning on the IE ESC is preventing server side vbscript from executing correctly on Windows Server 2008 R2.