This morning I needed to check the properties for one of our SharePoint application pools so I logged onto the server and opened Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager.  To my surprize the root was empty; it should have automatically connected to the localhost.  To my even greater surprize, all attempts to manually get IIS to connect to the server yeilded the message “The path specified cannot be used at this time”. 

After a quick search I found a post by Old Nick stating that this problem is easily resolved by restarting the Windows SharePoint Services Timer service.  That’s pretty obvious, right?  Sure enough, restarting that service solved the problem.  The next time I opened IIS it connected to the localhost.