I've recently had to deploy a site that has been siting in waiting for quite a while. When I tried to login it stated the username and password were incorrect. I changed the password format to 1 and manually entered a password into the db. This still failed... So I looked through the event log and found an error: "Membership credential verification failed.". Doing some investigation on this showed that the application name for the membership provider in web.config might not match that stored in the aspnet_Applications table. However, it did match, what didn't match was the actual virtual directory of the site which I believe is supposed to be the same as the application name. Now I'm in the frustrating situation where If the provider application name in web.config matches the DB and not the virtual path I get a credential verficiation error. If the provider name in web.config matches the virtual path and not the DB the initial login seems to proceed but then an "Object Reference not set..." error is thrown from line 534 in Signin.ascx.vb, which I'm guessing has something to do with the mismatch as I've deployed this site from a backup that was working at one stage. If I set all three values the same I again get the invalid username/password with the credential verification error behind the scenes.

Does anyone know how to solve this?

What sort of misconfiguration would cause the "Membership credential verification failed" message in the event log and a failed login when the providers application name in web.config matches the only application name in the aspnet_membershipApplications database table?

Also I'm using the original machineKey so I don't think it's that either - I imagine this wouldn't affect my test anyway as I changed the password format to 1 on one of the users and put a plain text password in