IISWMSVC_STARTUP_UNABLE_TO_ACTIVATE_HWC

We've been able to successfully, automatically, deploy our MVC and WebApi to IIS7.5 on Win2008 R2, for some time now. Just this week the MSDeploy stopped working. The System event log shows this error when attempting to restart the Web Management Service on the targeted Win200 R2 server:

The Web Management Service service terminated with service-specific error %%-2147483640.

The Application log shows this error at the same exact time the above error occurs.

IISWMSVC_STARTUP_UNABLE_TO_ACTIVATE_HWC

Failed to activate the Hostable Web Core (HWC). Web Management Service startup failed. Please reference the Win32 error in this event for further information. Exception:System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException (0x8007007F): The specified procedure could not be found. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x8007007F) at System.Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal.ThrowExceptionForHRInternal(Int32 errorCode, IntPtr errorInfo) at Microsoft.Web.Management.Server.WebServer.Microsoft.Web.Management.Server.Interop.IWebServer.Start() Process:WMSvc User=NT AUTHORITY\LOCAL SERVICE

The above error is preceded by this warning:

A listener channel for protocol 'http' in worker process '7164' serving application pool 'WMSvcAppPool' reported a listener channel failure. The data field contains the error number.

Which is preceded by this error:

Failed to find the RegisterModule entrypoint in the module DLL C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\webengine.dll. The data is the error.

We've attempted to reach the target server using https://ourservername:8172/MsDeploy.axd. The response is:

Error 102 (net::ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED): The server refused the connection

Is this occurring because the port is blocked or because the Web Management Service is not running? (The Windows Firewall with Advanced Security dialog says the "Windows Firewall is off" and there are no entries in the firewall log (C:\Windows\System32\LogFiles\Firewall).

We've seen some posts that indicate the certificate may be the issue. Not sure how to actually tell if this is the case though. The CERT we have says it is valid thru 2029.

I resolved the problem on a cloned Win2012 VM by changing the SSL certificate which was set to the original host. I used the self-cert.

I've put this here as a potential answer as I didn't read the question far enough to see the SSL comment at the end ;) and although the fix took 30 seconds we spent at least 2 days trying everything else.