note 20817 deleted from faq.installation by googleguy

Note Submitter: rodent at mighty dot co dot za ---- On windows 2000 installation I've had PHP simply hanging when running a PHP script. To see exactly what is going wrong with PHP in the context of the IUSR_MACHINENAME account create a shortcut on your desktop to point to cmd.exe. Right click on the shortcut, and select properties. Then check the 'run as a different user' checkbox of the property pages of the shortcut. Double click then shortcut, and you will be prompted for a user account to run the cmd.exe shell under. Enter IUSR_MACHINENAME (replace machine name with the machine name of your system), and enter the password for the account. If you don't know the password for the IUSR account you might need to go change it in Administrative Tools->Computer Management. Enter the password, and you will be dropped into a command prompt. Now run c:\php\php.exe -i and see if you can catch any error messages. On my system it had a problem accessing c:\winnt\system32\browscap.ini which I was then able to sort out. Running PHP as the Administrator user didn't give this problem, so being able to impersonate the IIS account was a very useful diagnostic tool.