When newing up an instance of X509Certificate2(string, string) my IIS process simply crashes. No .Net exception, no nothing, except of this in my event log
Faulting application name: w3wp.exe, version: 8.0.9200.16384, time stamp: 0x50108835
Faulting module name: ntdll.dll, version: 6.2.9200.16420, time stamp: 0x505ab405
Exception code: 0xc0000374
Fault offset: 0x00000000000ea485
Faulting process id: 0x102c
Faulting application start time: 0x01ce10301e250c4d
Faulting application path: c:\windows\system32\inetsrv\w3wp.exe
Faulting module path: C:\Windows\SYSTEM32\ntdll.dll
Report Id: 5e55321c-7c23-11e2-93f9-00155d8a0f17
Faulting package full name:
Im pretty stunned and don't know where to start looking. When attaching a debugger to the process, i'm able to break unto this line, but when stepping over it the the whole thing crashes.
_certificate = new X509Certificate2(pfxFile, pfxPassword);
pfxFile is a valid path, if i change it i immediately get a correct .Net PathNotFound exception.
Server is Windows 2012, running IIS8 and .Net 4.5.
Update
This article describes the same problem where a solution is to make sure the App Pool identity has LoadUserProfile enabled.
I had a similar problem, also on Windows Server 2012, which crashed IIS, when using
new X509Certificate2(fileName, keyPassword, X509KeyStorageFlags.Exportable)
This was fixed by changing the constructor to
new X509Certificate2(fileName, keyPassword, X509KeyStorageFlags.MachineKeySet | X509KeyStorageFlags.PersistKeySet | X509KeyStorageFlags.Exportable)