Net stop/start W3SVC and Stop/Start-Service W3SVC vs IISRESET STOP/START

I encountered a problem where I wanted to stop and start IIS by using either the command line or powershell versions of stopping and starting IIS.

NET STOP W3SVC
NET START W3SVC
or
Stop-Service W3SVC
Start-Service W3SVC

Both of those stopped and started the World Wide Publishing service correctly. But both appeared to not stop/recycle the worker processes. With Net start and stop giving an error message when IIS was already stopped and/or started before running those commands, resulting in a scheduled task error code.

I found that using the IISRESET command, it does close those worker processes and when IIS was already stopped and/or started it didn’t return an error, thus resulting in the scheduled task returning a nice 0x0 (success)

Thus: use the following commands (also within powershell) if you want to stop/start IIS websites. This will always work as intended and not return an error code (in some cases, where the others would)

IISRESET /STOP
IISRESET /START

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