I am having this weird issue with IIS 7.5 on Windows 2008 R2 x64. I created a site in IIS and manually created a test file index.html and everything worked. When I try to do a deployment, I copy all the files from my local PC to the IIS server, try to access index.html (this is the proper deployed file) and getting 401.3 access denied error. I then try to manually recreate index.html and copy content into this newly created file and the page is accessible again... I just can't figure this out. So the issue is that IIS 7.5 can't server files that have been copied from other PCs. I tried to reset/apply permission settings to the copied folders/files but nothing has worked. Please help. Thanks! By the way, the files that I copied are just some html cutups i.e. generic html, css and image files, nothing special.