I currently am working on a server migration. We are moving my customer's web site and database platform into an Enterprise computing center. The Production environment will eventually be running on an HP Superdome. As part of the migration, we moved both the web and database servers from a 32 bit platform to Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2, running on Itanium 64 hardware. We also are migrating our RDBMS from SQL Server 2000 to SQL Server 2005. We have done a lot of work so far, including rewriting many ETL scripts, but we still have much work to do. One interesting problem, I just resolved involved hosting Office Web Components (OWC) 2003.

Our customer uses Office Web Components 2003 for basic charting functions. In our current environment (Windows 2003 Server 32 bit mode)  the customer's web content runs without issues. We ported the web pages over and when instantiating the OWC Charts objects, we received the infamous "Cannot Create ActiveX Object error".  I did a lot of research, tried registering the control using regvsr32.exe, assigning the dll full permissions to the 'everyone' windows group to no avail.

Finally I realized that OWC is a 32 bit ActiveX object. Our IIS 6.0 environment was configured for 64 bits. I researched the feasiblity of using a different 64 bit ActiveX control, but that would include a lot of time spent on evaluation, testing, recommendation, and procuring funding - not to mention rewriting all of the code that uses our OWC Chart objects. The approach I ended up taking was to configure IIS to run in 32 bit mode. I also had to install the 32 bit version of ASP .Net in the framework directory. This process is discussed in the following Microsoft Knowlege Base Article:http://support.microsoft.com/kb/894435

I performed both steps described in the section "ASP.NET 2.0, 32-bit version". This includes running a script to enable IIS 32 bit mode, and installing the version of ASP.NET 2.0 (32-bit) and to install the script maps at the IIS root.