HTTP 500 error when you login in Joomla as an administrator

Hi All,

I was trying to install and configure one of the most popular open source CMS Joomla 3.2. After i installed and configured my first site, I was getting HTTP 500 error when i log in as administrator from the site.

I checked and i found that the super user is created in the database and the username/password has permissions to access the created DB for the site but i can not log in to the CMS site as a super user or administrator!

I check the configuration.php and web.config and i found the following http handlers has been added in the web.config file by IIS.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<configuration>
    <system.webServer>
        <directoryBrowse enabled="true" />
        <handlers accessPolicy="Read, Execute, Script">
            <remove name="PHP55_via_FastCGI" />
            <add name="PHP55_via_FastCGI" path="*.php" verb="GET,HEAD,POST" modules="FastCgiModule" scriptProcessor="C:\Program Files (x86)\PHP\v5.5\php-cgi.exe" resourceType="Either" requireAccess="Script" />
        </handlers>
    </system.webServer>
</configuration>

I have installed and configured PHP 5.5 using IIS 7.5 in Windows 8 but i do not know why the IIS has added the highlighted entries in the web.config.

The fix, is to remove the PHP http handlers from the web.config and the log in will start working like a charm !

Hope this helps.

- ME