Deleting Root managed Path doesn't take affect

Hi,

I am trying to setup a fresh Windows 2003/WSS3 server with a few HTML files at the root of the website and a couple of Site Collections as sub webs. I have setup similar environments with WSS2 serval times, but I am having trouble getting it to work with WSS3.

Here is what I am doing...

1. Create IIS Website and put a "Default.htm" file at the root
2. Test it and works fine
3. Create a new SharePoint Web Application on that IIS website.
4. Go to the root of the IIS website and it displays "HTTP/1.1 404 Connection: close Date: Thu, 15 Feb 2007 22:12:53 GMT Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0 X-Powered-By: ASP.NET MicrosoftSharePointTeamServices: 12.0.0.4518" instead of the contents of the "default.htm" file.
5. If I enterhttp://website/default.htm is works fine, but for some reason the default content page listed in IIS isn't comming up.

I have tried...

1. Deleting the "root" from the managed path list in the sharepoint admin website.
2. Tried to set the root as "Excluded" but STSAdm.exe says "exclusion" is no longer needed because SharePoint automatically detects real files. This may be the case, but it seems to get confused when a request comes in for the default content page at the root.

This seems like a simple setup to me, but I can't seem to get it to work. I don't know if it matters, but I am running it in Account Creation Mode with a MS SQL 2005 Express backend.

Any help would be appriciated.

Thanks!
Matt

[1697 byte] By [MatthewForsellScales] at [2007-12-30]