There are many reasons why an application might send an error 500 page. This post describes a common one for WordPress installations, and describes the simple solution.
There are a variety of circumstances where WordPress can’t finish processing a request and so it calls an internal function called “wp_die”. This is supposed to display a friendly error message so that the user can take corrective action. Unfortunately, however, IIS7 intercepts the error and displays a generic “Error 500″ page instead.
An example is where use the “Add Site” function in a multi-site installation. If you enter an invalid site name, WordPress will try to tell you that there is a problem. Unfortunately, IIS7 traps the error and sends back the default 500 error page instead of the helpful message. This leaves you with no way to know what the real problem could be.
The simple solution is to add the following code to your web.config file:
[sourcecode language=”HTML”]
… all your other stuff
[/sourcecode]
This tells IIS to pass the exception through to the end user without the interception, and results in you seeing the friendly exception details instead of the default error page.