What does 'IISReset' do?

Question

On IIS 6, what does an IIS reset do?

Please compare to recycling an app pool and stopping and starting an ASP.NET web site.

If you replace a DLL or edit/rep

Answer 1

Application Pool recycling restarts the w3wp.exe process for that application pool, hence it will only affect web sites running in that application pool.

IISReset restarts ALL w3wp.exe processes and any other IIS related service, i.e. the NNTP or FTP Service.

I think changing web.config or /bin does not recycle the whole application pool, but I'm not sure on that.