IIS7.5 Virtual Directory Wrong Physical Path

I have been fighting this problem for hours, and I can't make IIS (7.5 on 2008r2) do the right thing. Every time I try to go to the photos virtual directory, I get a 404.0 and the physical path listed is wrong and different from the physical path I setup on the virtual directory. Here is the setup:

I have a virtual directory photos setup under the Default Web Site.

The Default Web Site's physical path is G:\inetpub\wwwroot and it's only binding is *:80. The application pool for the website is setup to run as a domain user created for this purpose. That user has permissions to the mentioned G path, and the F path below.

The virtual directory has alias photos, physical path F:\photos. When I click Test Settings, it comes back successful. (The application pool user can access the path.)

When I click Browse on the photos virtual directory, I get a 404.0 - Not Found. Plus the following information.

Requested Url: http://localhost:80/photos
Physical Path: G:\inetpub\wwwroot\photos

The physical path is clearly wrong and not what I configured. What am I doing wrong?

Log Entry

#Software: Microsoft Internet Information Services 7.5
#Version: 1.0
#Date: 2015-01-29 01:44:48
#Fields: date time s-ip cs-method cs-uri-stem cs-uri-query s-port cs-username c-ip cs(User-Agent) sc-status sc-substatus sc-win32-status time-taken
2015-01-29 01:44:48 ::1 GET /photos - 80 - ::1 Mozilla/5.0+(Windows+NT+6.1;+WOW64;+Trident/7.0;+rv:11.0)+like+Gecko 404 0 2 1403

Page Error message

Module        IIS Web Core 
Notification  MapRequestHandler 
Handler       StaticFile 
Error Code    0x80070002 
Requested URL http://localhost:80/photos
Physical Path G:\inetpub\wwwroot\photos
Logon Method  Anonymous 
Logon User    Anonymous 

Missing piece of this puzzle: IIS is setup as a failover service with a shared configuration in a 2008 R2 failover cluster.

So the apparent reason this was happening was the shared configuration and / or failover cluster. Even after changing the virtual directory configuration, the old configuration was cached and even restarting IIS would not cause it to be refreshed.

I was only able to get the configuration to reload by migrating the service to another node. Then the virtual directory was working properly.