IIS Manager is installed but shows empty page

Question

^{I hope this is the right place to ask. I was thinking serverfault might not be correct, since the computer in question is not a server. Feel free to migrate if StackOverflow is not right.}

I usually install IIS on servers but have installed it on Workstations before. I actually had the same problem with another machine of the same model a few weeks ago but can't remember how I resolved it. I must have installed additional features or run some powershell-command that did not resolve the issue on this machine.

I installed IIS the correct way using the Windows Features, as described in the answers to this question. I've actually removed and reinstalled it since then, but it hasn't resolved my problem.
The WWW publishing service is running and I can open the IIS Manager, but it's completely empty, unlike here where the IIS Manager at least shows the local computer

When I type localhost into a browser I don't see the IIS Startpage, I get the error ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED

You can see that all the required checkboxes are checked:

And the service seems to be running.

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I've since tried installing IIS using

• DISM:
• Powershell:

And I checked the status using the iisreset command which was mentioned in the comments here (second linked question upstairs):

It restarts without any error and says everything is working fine.

Has anyone ever encountered this before or might know what I could try to get IIS actually working?

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Edit: I just noticed, while trying to uninstall IIS, that I can not uninstall it. I used Windows-Features and confirmed to reboot when prompted, but while rebooting Windows does a rollback and IIS is still available. So I can't even uninstall it.

Also just found this similar quesion on SuperUser. I'm still trying some suggestions there. So far to no avail.

Answer 1

Thanks for the comments.

I was on vacation, but a colleague was able to fix the problem. Unfortunately, the solution was to reset Windows 11. He was then able to install IIS through Windows Features and it worked.

No idea why it didn't work in the first place, or why it got to this unrecoverable state. But now everything is fine.