I'm using WSS 3 and I recently added a new web application to my SharePoint Server. After adding it, I wasn't able to open the Central Administration site. I also noticed that there was a w3wp.exe error (Event ID 1000) in the Event Viewer.

The situation now is that the w3wp.exe process is hovering around 50% CPU usage continuously. I installed a program called IIS Peek, and it shows continuous GET requests on the Central Administration site; this happens even if I stop the Central Administration site in IIS. The IP addresses identified in the GET request is my workstation, which is what I used to attempt to access Central Administration after I created the new web application.

Can someone explain what's going on and how I might fix it? It seems as if my computer tried to access Central Administration and then it hung, but the page requests that were happening at the time are somehow continuing over and over again. So my two problems are the inability to access Central Administration, and the CPU Usage of w3wp.exe, which I'm assuming are two symptoms of the same problem. I'd like to know if there's anything I can do besides restarting IIS, because we have clients accessing other sites on this server. Thanks.