One of our .NET developers had problems with a ASP.NET application on his machine. Looking at the event viewer there was the following entry:
Description: The description for Event ID ( 0 ) in Source ( .NET Runtime ) cannot be found. The local computer may not have the necessary registry information or message DLL files to display messages from a remote computer. You may be able to use the /AUXSOURCE= flag to retrieve this description; see Help and Support for details. The following information is part of the event: unable to open shim database version registry key - v2.0.50727.00000
There is a hotfix for this problem and this behaviour is caused because the ASP.NET application needs read/write access to a specific registry key but has only read access. You could also Registry Monitor to check which registry key(s) is causing this behaviour.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/918642
Cross-posted from
The .NET Aficionado