You can visit my forums at http://forum.mastersofthemat.com 

Any help would be appreciated thanks in advance

I thought the application pool is created once the application is started ...ie "click the play button on the website in IIS". So if no one goes to the forums for a half an hour the pool gets recreated the next time someone visits it? I am not ruling out an IIS problem, there must be some settings I have wrong, any ideas?

The pool is 'created' (with it's settings and configuration/identity) but it is not 'launched' until a request comes into the web server. By default, IIS shuts down any inactive App Pools in 20 minutes of no activity (no requests). It also attempts to detect failures and dead-locked pools and recycles them as needed. You can override the IIS shutdown period for an application pool in it's configuration, but if you set a pool to be active continuously then it is recommended you at least allow it to recycle (restart) the pool every so often. On my servers I lease out, we recycle most of ours every 24 hours - ones with 'poorly written applications' get recycled every 6 hours to maintain overall server availability as well as to keep resource consumption at a dull-roar. Poorly written applications will consume memory and resources and can bring a server to a crawl if not monitored.