Working on a client’s SharePoint site – I wanted to pop into the IIS configuration screen:

Now when your IIS manager shows you a blank page – you know something’s up.
Event log shows a horrible series of errors repeating event IDs:
6398: The Execute method of job definition Microsoft.Office.Server.Administration.ApplicationServerAdministrationServiceJob (ID <guid>) threw an exception. More information is included below.
Attempted to read or write protected memory. This is often an indication that other memory is corrupt.

7076: An exception occurred while executing the Application Server Administration job.
Message: Attempted to read or write protected memory. This is often an indication that other memory is corrupt.

6482: Application Server Administration job failed for service instance Microsoft.Office.Excel.Server.ExcelServerSharedWebServiceInstance (7d2d13a5-e9ca-4b92-972c-8e3bdfcaced4).
Reason: Attempted to read or write protected memory. This is often an indication that other memory is corrupt.

Fortunately, many people have blogged about this issue – if you bing it you’ll see many references pointing to the same MS KB article: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;946517

This is scheduled to be included in the next service pack – affects both Windows Server 2003 sp2 and 2008 sp2.  In our case we needed to request the hotfix and install it right away.