Cannot get ADO connection working on a classic ASP website running in IIS Express on Windows 7 64 bit

Question

I have a legacy classic ASP website that I need to do some maintenance work on. My development machine is running Windows 7 64 bit, Visual Studio 2012 and IIS Express 8.0.

The ASP app is backed by a Microsoft Access database.

The website runs fine until it tries to establish a connection to the database, where it fails with the following:

0x800a0e7a - ADODB.Connection: Provider cannot be found. It may not be properly installed.

Answer 1

If the ASP process is running as 64-bit and it is trying to use the Jet database engine then that won't work because there is no 64-bit version of Jet. If that is the case then you can either

• install the 64-bit version of the Access Database Engine (ACE), available here, and tweak the connection parameters as required, or

• get the ASP process to run as 32-bit

Answer 2

I had the same problem you mention in a follow up comment.

I tried to install the 64 bit version, but I could not because I have Office 2010 32 bit installed.

You can force the 64 bit version of the Access Database Engine (ACE) from here to install with the 'passive' switch:

AccessDatabaseEngine_x64.exe /passive