ASP.NET Unable to Read Config Settings from External Config Files

We are experiencing some strange behaviour on one of our ASP.NET web servers (Windows 2003 64-bit). After some activity, two third-party controls are unable to run correctly. One is log4net (it does not write error messages out) and the other is a menu control (it displays eval message instead of picking up its license). The one common thread is that both controls pick up their config from external config files (linked to from web.config).

Just wondering if anyone has any thoughts on this or experienced this in any way. Is it related to file/folder rights? Th开发者_StackOverflow中文版e server has been running fine for a while and just started exhibiting this behaviour. Perhaps it occurs around the time the worker processes are recycled. Not yet sure. An iisreset seems to fix the problem.

-Krip

We think we may have found the issue. Licenses / initialization for both components occur in application startup routine and a method run prior to both is failing.