I have two exactly the same web sites hosted in two different machines under IIS 7.5.
ASP.NET state service is running on my machine and the web.config is updated in both si
My issue was that my two applications were using different major versions of the Owin libraries. Once I ensured all Owin libraries between the two applications shared the same version, I was able to get this to work by following the answer posted by Hoàng Long.