If you have worked on Windows Azure you are bound to have faced this gnawing and dreaded issue – Your Web/Worker role goes from ‘initializing’ to ‘busy’ to ‘stopping’ but refuses to get ‘ready’. For those of us who have resorted to merciless desktop vandalism over this, there is still hope.

In his post MSFT’s Toddy Mladenov summarizes few plausible reasons for this -

1. Missing runtime dependencies (DLLs)

2. Incorrect platform version of a DLL

3. Incorrect DiagnosticsConnectionString/DataConnectionString

4. Queues/Tables being read during initialization do not exist.

5. Certificate without exportable private key.

6. Returning from Run Method in Worker Role.

For a more detailed and precise account visit his post:

http://blog.toddysm.com/2010/01/windows-azure-deployment-stuck-in-initializing-busy-stopping-why.html

- Tinu, O