Ok,

I'm officially an idiot.

Since the two applications were not... "applications" in IIS due to me being an idiot and forgetting to set them as such and not noticing every one of the 3 thousand times I checked IIS cfg, global.asa was obviously not being read.

Thank you all, as usual, for you help and generosity. You definitely helped me think in the right direction: when I realized that no matter what I changed in global.asa I always got the same error, I finally saw the light.

Alright, I'm off for a coffee. Thanks again.