asp (not dot net) troubleshooting is awful in 2008/IIS7

Well I found that when upgrading older applications written in the original asp to 2008/IIS7 can be very difficult as it appears no matter what you do, all errors return "500 Server error". I did read if you change the ASP options to show "Send Errors to Browser" and disable "HTTP Friendly error messages", and do this locally on the server, no matter what..you still only get "500 Server error". So the really cool error reporting and repair suggestions work great for asp.net, but don't bother with them for good old asp pages. The ASP CDO emailer page I was modifying had perfect code, but the SMTP server was rejecting my connection, and blamo, 500 server error.