It doesn't matter if you have 3.5 framework installed on an Windows 2003 server.
I had the misfortune of deciding to install an upgrade on a module on my stie in the weeee hours of the morning and still can't work out which planet I must have been on to consider doing this because it ended up with my site breaking badly.
So i thought , let me go back to that upgrade I'd tried for some time earlier in the day.
Here is the summary of what I found -
3.5 framework may very well be installed on your windows 2003 server, and all the ajax information on the server, but IIS 6 does not recognise this in the property dropdowns if you try to see if the 3.5 framework is in fact installed.
I believe it is mainly a Win2k3 issue with IIS 6, where, if you use the dotnetnuke install zip instead of upgrade you will not get into this problem, or accept that you will have to copy those files across each time you do an upgrade on your win2k3 box.
When I do an new install of dnn it automatically applies the 3.5 framework, but when I do an upgrade, only with the install zip and not the source zip can i go through the procedure, so I don't believe that applying a 3.5 check will resolve this, as I had other new sites running 5.1.1 without issue.
The site I upgraded from had a 5.01 build and although it failed on one of the sql scripts, managed to upgrade and log in and all seems fine.
What I also think is amazing is my dnn 3 modules (since this is a 3.2.2 upgrade over time) still run. These modules are around 3.5 > 4 years old without being updated, yet lasted through many upgrades. Not bad I think.
But that is my take on this for anyone who is on a windows 2003 server with .net 3.5 framework installed,and unable to see it in the properties tab of their IIS snap in. Even trying to register the extension didn't work, but somehow it automatically is now running 3.5 framework when i checked the host settings and that error disappeared as soon as I dropped the appropriate dlls into the bin folder.
Nina Meiers