I installed the W3 Total Cache plugin last night and enabled about 1/2 of the features. Everything seemed fine initially so I left it alone. Today I went to write a post and noticed my site was down. Yikes! No idea how long it was down because no one bothered to tell me (thanks for nothing readers! :>).
Since the last thing I changed was adding the W3TC plugin, I decided to remove that. Since I couldn’t get the site to load, I had to figure out a way to do this manually. Thankfully I stumbled across this post:
http://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/36504/wordpress-manual-uninstall-of-w3-total-cache/
I followed the directions there (minus the .htaccess steps since I’m running on Windows/IIS versus Linux/Apache) then killed all the PHP and W3WP processes related to my site that were running. They kept popping up new ones so I stopped the app pool, then tried again and was able to kill them all. After that I restarted the app pool and hit the URL – all better! Yeah!
I think I’ll avoid that plugin now. :)