Fixing "connection refused" when trying to ftp into iis, "the system cannot find the drive specified" when using the iis admin interface, "2148073487: object already exists" when trying to start the ftp service and "0x8009000F = Object Already Exists" when trying to reload IIS onto a w2k server. That should sort out the google search requests - for details read on.......
Ftp was not responding on the server, giving a connection refused message. I then tried to use the administration interface but that was complaining that the system could not find the drive specified. This was a bit concerning, but a quick check showed that all the drives were still on the server. KB article 295162 mentioned that permissions needed to be reset on the %SystemDrive%\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\Crypto\RSA\MachineKeys folder. I had to add system to the permissions but what the article doesn't say is whether you have to propogate the permissions down the tree. I did and it still didn't make any difference.
Removing IIS was fine but when I came to reinstall it I got "0x8009000F = Object Already Exists" and a prompt to write some unencrypted data. This didn't help either until I read kb article 271865 which says that you need to delete the content of all the files in the aforementioned folder except for the most recent one. The downside is that I had two files in the directory with identical dates! I deleted them both, hoped that the existence of 1 file was not essential to Windows2000 and rebooted. The system came back up and ftp worked.