Kill IIS process without rebooting

Sometimes you need to restart IIS (for example the last shutdown of World Wide Web Publishing Service locked on "stopping") and you really can't or don't want to reboot the server. Microsoft provides a utility called iisreset (located in winnt\system32). That should be in your $path so you don't really need to know that.

Simply open a "dos command prompt windows" and type iisreset /stop and then iisreset /start

Here is a printout of "iisreset /?":

IISRESET.EXE (c) Microsoft Corp. 1998-1999

Usage:
iisreset [computername]

/RESTART Stop and then restart all Internet services.

/START Start all Internet services.

/STOP Stop all Internet services.

/REBOOT Reboot the computer.

/REBOOTONERROR Reboot the computer if an error occurs when starting, stopping, or restarting Internet services.

/NOFORCE Do not forcefully terminate Internet services if attempting to stop them gracefully fails.

/TIMEOUT:val Specify the timeout value ( in seconds ) to wait for a successful stop of Internet services. On expiration of this timeout the computer can be rebooted if
the /REBOOTONERROR parameter is specified. The default value is 20s for restart, 60s for stop, and 0s for reboot.

/STATUS Display the status of all Internet services.

/ENABLE Enable restarting of Internet Services on the local system.

/DISABLE Disable restarting of Internet Services on the local system.