I created a website in ASP.Net and published it to a location in the hard drive within the default projects folder of VS2010 (C:\Users\\Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Projects\\PrecompiledWeb).

This was a simple website project, nothing fancy, that looked like this:

I created an Application in IIS 7.5 under local host (Root -> Sites -> Default Website) and provided the physical path of the website to the location of my precompiled bit. By default the AppPool used is the DefaultAppPool that by default runs on the AppPoolIdentity. But when I try to access the site I got the following:

For me this error kept cropping up and the reason was that the account on which the app pool was running did not have access to the physical location of the website files. You can check the account by going to Application pool node -> Select the app pool -> click Advanced settings on the left menu and scroll down. Ensure that you provide read access to the physical location. Once you do the error goes away.