Could not find a web server at ‘localhost’

I am having a problem with running an ASP.Net project on my laptop that is running XP professional (SP2) and IIS 5.1. When I start a new ASP.NET project in Visual Studio I get the error message:

”Unable to create Web Project ‘WebApplication1’. Could not find a web server at ‘localhost’ on port 80. Please check to make sure that the web server name is valid and your proxy settings are set correctly. If you are sure that everything is correct, the web server may be temporarily out of service”.

If I try accessing an existing ASP.Net project I copied from another Machine I get the error:

“Unable to open Web project <Project Name>. Unable to validate that the file path ‘C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\<ProjectDirectory>’ matches the URL path ‘http://localhost/<ProjectName>’. A connection with the server could not be established.

When I try to load up the IIS default page in Internet Explorer (using ‘http://localhost/’ as the address) it tells me ‘WWW disabled’ even though IIS appears to be running fine. I can however load the ASP.NET project start page by using 127.0.0.1 as the address rather than localhost. It looks like localhost is not mapped to 127.0.0.1 but when I ping both in the command window I get replies indicating that they are mapped?

Any help for this newbie would be much appreciated?

Turn off all firewalls and try it.

Yup. Tried that but unfortunately I still get the same problem. I suspect it's something to do with the laptop being unable to reconcile 127.0.0.1 with 'localhost'. Thanks for the thought though. If you have any other suggestions then I'd be v. grateful to hear them.

Regards

Lee100

After much trial and error this issue has finally been resolved. This was done (on my XP Pro machine) by doing the following:

Load Internet Explorer (ver 6.0) and Select Tools -> Internet Options -> Connections Tab -> Lan Settings and set the ‘Bypass proxy server for local addresses’. Press the Advanced button and in the text box headed ‘Do not use proxy server for addresses beginning with:’ enter the address 127.0.0.1

I still have to occasionally re-set the work offline option on IE and I did get some trouble with the debugging permissions but at least the thing works now.

I'm glad you got it going.

Thanks Lee! I followed your instructions to bypass proxy for local addresses in IE.
However, I had to change one thing in IIS settings before I got it to avoid displaying the "WWW Disabled" message.
In Internet Information Services (Start -> Control Panel -> Performance&Maint -> Admin Tools), drill down to "Default Web Site", right click "Default Web Site", select properties, click the "Web Site" tab, ensure that the IP Address value is set to 127.0.0.1
I also selected the "Home Directory" tab and ticked the Local Path's "Read" option.