Avoiding Metabase Corruption

IIS 6 on W2K3 has a new feature that helps prevent metabase corruption, something that happened often with IIS 5 on W2K. The way it works is like this: if you enable direct metabase editing in IIS 6 and make a change to the metabase using Notepad and the change you make is not well-formed (i.e. syntactically correct) XML, then the last saved version of the metabase from the metabase history file is used to replace the corrupted in-memory metabase. Pretty cool, but don't get carried away as this won't protect you from corrputing the metabase by writing well-formed but meaningless XML!