We are using Sitecore 6 on a Windows Server 2003 (32bit) dev machine.

I know it's not recommended for the CMS editing site, but we've been told it is possible to get the front-end Sitecore websites to run from within a virtual directory.

Here's the issue:

we'd like to achieve what the below poor mans diagram shows.

We have a website (.net 1.1)

/WebSiteRoot (.net 1.1)
|
|
|---- Custom .net 1.1 Web Application
|
|---- SiteCore frontend WebApplication (.net 2.0)
|
|---- Custom .net 2.0 WebApplication

The Sitecore webApplication would contain the Sitecore pipeline in its web.config and we'd make use of the section to configure the virtual folder to allow for where our Sitecore app sits and point it to the appropriate place in the Content Tree.

Is it possible to pull this off? This is just the customer facing website, there will be no CMS editing functionality on these servers, that will be done from a more standard Sitecore install inside the firewall on a different server.

The errors we're encountering are centered around loading the the various config files in the App_Config folder.

It seems to do a Server.MapPath on "/" initially (which is wrong for us) so we've tried putting absolute paths in the web.config and still no joy (I think there must be some hardcoded piece that looks for the Include directory).

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks