"Failed to access IIS metabase" after installing Windows XP Pro

When I installed Visual Studio 2005 on Windows 2000 Pro, my asp.net 2.0 sites on http://localhost worked fine.

Then I upgraded the OS to Windows XP Pro and now all the sites report "Failed to access IIS metabase", all the time ("file" websites work fine).

I have already been working this problem a full day, and have already tried:
1) "Repair" .NET Framework 2.0
2) aspnet_regiis -ga <user> for every user on my system (starting with ASPNET, and IUSER_machin, IWAM...)
3) aspnet_regiis -u followed by aspnet_regiis -i
4) Deinstall and completely reinstall .NET Framework 2.0
5) Deinstall and completely reinstall Visual Studio 2005

I have found a reference for adding the ASPNET user as an "operator", but as IIS 5.1 does not support the Operators tab this is not possible.

I can make the error message "Failed to access IIS metabase" go away by making the ASPNET user a member of the Administrators local group, so this is a good step for diagnosis but I don't want ASPNET to be an administrator.

How can I set the access to the metabase manually for ASPNET?

Other wacky idea: My OS is loaded in C:\WINNT (because of the upgrade from Win2000); could there be some hard-coded "C:\Windows" somewhere in aspnet_regiis that derails my attempts?

Thanks for any help!

---Wayne

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