Odd, I wasn't seeing any change in the error message earlier.
Time to fiddle
Edit (10:32) : Tedious fiddling. The server takes several minutes to realize that I made changes. :|
Edit (10:50) : Perhaps 'minutes' is not quite the right term....
Edit (11:00) : Renamed the Default.aspx file so as to incur a 404 error. No effect in the error message. Apparently it can still read it using the original filename
Edit (12:01) : Checked again; server realized I renamed the file and displayed the proper 404 error. Fixing this may take quite some time. =/
Edit (12:07) : Renaming the folder after every edit forces the server to re-load the files. Anyway, the error does indeed point to web.config, and the error is that the server does not like the <pages> xml node to have any child nodes (<namespaces> and <add namespace=... /> in this case), though removing them causes the server to not know what any types are, "_Default" included, thus causing an error parsing line 1:
Parser Error
Description: Error parsing a resource required to service this request. Review your source file and modify it to fix this error.
Error message:
Cannot find type _Default
File name: /home/elements/public_html/BlankAspx5/Default.aspx
Line: 1
Furthermore, removing that causes the parser to complain about the CodeFile= portion of the ASP.NET header. Removing that portion of the header (or removing the header completely) results in the parser not being able to tell what version of ASP the page uses, complaining yet again.
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In summary: The 500 error that the server has been giving people is a direct result of the parser reading the web.config file and finding the <namespaces> and <add namespace=... /> child xml nodes within the <pages> node block. Hence the "No child nodes allowed here" error message. These nodes in the file are both normal and required: removing them causes more problems. Think of them as includes in a C++ program; removing them will cause the compiler to lack essential data. In this case, however, leaving them in causes the parser to complain.
While I cannot ascertain the reason behind this, it is likely a server configuration error, not an error in the aspx or web.config files.