Today one of my friend installed reporting services on his machine and got this error while trying to access the report server -
The process account used to run ASP.NET must have read access to the IIS metabase (e.g. IIS://servername/W3SVC). For information on modifying metabase permissions, please see http://support.microsoft.com/
Solution provided in support link solved the problem, we just needed to give permissions to the ASPNET account by sunning aspnet_regiis -ga ASPNET command within the .net framework 2.0 directory.
C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727>aspnet_regiis -ga ASPNET
Although I am not very sure why this error occurred, some posts mention that this error occurs if IIS was installed after .net 2.0 but I don't think this was the cause in our case but anyway's all's well if it ends well.