Also, when attempting to create a new parent portal, the timeout message appears exactly 90 seconds after clicking the 'create portal" button.

Thanks for your help Matthias.  I'm not sure I follow you on the ISP route... but I've tried to add the portal on two separate ISP's.  The first being my home ISP which is Comcast.  The second being my work ISP which is Paetec.  Now if you mean who is my hosting provider?  My host provider is Network Soloutions.  I'm assuming their configuration manager is some kind of in-house tool that they have developed... it's not Plesk or any other 3rd party app that I've seen before.

Additional info... 

1.  On the first day that I experienced this issue I also reset all file permissions.  After testing, the create portal still timed out after 90 seconds.

2.  Yesterday I attepted to alter the timeout time on the site by adding executionTimeout="720" to the httpRuntime node in my web.config.   It did not raise the page timeout from 90 seconds.  After testing, the create portal still timed out after 90 seconds.

I am totally stuck!  I have a client who is expecting their site to be up and running soon!

Troy

Thanks Matthias.  I have opened a ticket with my host provider (Network Solutions) concerning IIS access.  I'm still at a loss why you are concerned with my ISP.  When I see "ISP" I think of my internet service provider... of which I have no "configuration application" with.  Perhaps "ISP" means something different to you?

Thanks again for taking the time to help me out.

UPDATE:  Purely on a whim I decided to just simply click 'create portal' again immediately after receiving the timeout message.  It immediately instructed me that it could not add the portal because the portal alias already existed... as expected right.  So I went to delete the portal for the 8th time... when I noticed that in portal settings this particular portal actually had a page count of +1 now.  It had always been -1 on all previous attempts.  So I attempted to load the website via the domain name in another browser window and viola! the portal was functional.  VERY STRANGE.  At least I have the portal running so my client doesn't fire me.

I still want to get this resolved because obviously this is not the desired behavior.  I will post back here with an update after I explore the IIS settings.

Thanks,

Troy