How to Overcome Error "Access to the Path Containing 'hash.web' is Getting Denied."

Introduction

After installing Visual Studio .NET and refreshing the page couple of times, I used to get this error frequently. The only resolution was to wait for upto 5 to 10 minutes or reboot system, since a folder in Temporary ASP.NET files containing web.config gets locked up automatically.

After searching a while in KBs, forums, I found one closest matching solution, which solved the problem. Just wanted to share with other readers who would also be experiencing this issue. The problem occurs significantly if you touch web.config and ASP.NET has significant memory consumption (as seen in Windows Task Manager).

There is a service called Indexing Service which runs in the system. During F5, ASP.NET tries to JIT compile the new DLL (as my understanding goes) and when simultaneously ASP.NET and Indexing service goes to the specified set of cache files, the deadlock occurs and ASP.NET throws this exception.

Solutions:

1. Keep Indexing Service manual or stop it.
2. In Indexing Service Preferences, make C:/Winnt/Microsoft.NET to be excluded or placed in the exclusion catalog so that Indexing Service will not access this location.