The problem: All I could see in the log file was that error message “sitecore shutting down – initialization error“. This didn’t tell me much of where the issue was coming from except when Sitecore is spinning up.
So I took a look in the Event viewer to check out any logs there.
Open “Event Viewer” by clicking the “Start” button. Click “Control Panel” > “System and Security” > “Administrative Tools”, and then double-click “Event Viewer”.
Go to Windows Logs -> Application and you’ll see the latest log inputs at the top.
Click it and read the details. There I saw my problem.
It was a config file that was hooking into the initialize pipeline and had a faulty dependency. Whops. Fix that and bada boom, Sitecore starts to spin up again.
Sitecore Tackled 