title: How to diagnose an internal server error (HTTP 500) from a PHP page in IIS 7.5
body: <p>I am trying to get a trial copy of the aMember membership management system running on my local dev machine, which is Windows 7 64-bit with IIS 7.5.  I have MySQL 5.5.10 and PHP 5.3.6, the latter which I installed using the Windows installer package.  It <em>seems</em> fine.  </p>
  
  <p>The aMember package has a tester.php script which I ran, and it gave an 'OK' result, despite its output being full of error messages related to <em>Function eregi() is deprecated</em>.  I then ran the setup.php script, which seemed to run properly.  It took me through one or two screens of gathering e.g. login information for MySQL, and then said it was completed and offered me links to some aMember admin pages.  None of these links work, and clicking any of them results in an <em>Internal Server error (HTTP 500):  An unexpected condition was encountered while the server was attempting to fulfill the request.</em></p>
  
  <p>What can I do to further diagnose this error, short of placing lots of diagnostic writes in the php pages themselves?  Tools at my disposal are Aptana Studio and Visual Studio, although I doubt the latter is any use here.  I have logged the issue with aMember support, who quickly asked for my server logs, and then disappeared. </p>