Access is denied when creating Windows Performance Counters

I have a .Net web service (written for 1.1 Framework using C#) running on Windows 2003 with all latest patches. To help monitor the service, the code creates several performance counters. One server (this is a farm) I receive the following exception when trying to create the performance counters. We had an earlier issue where the ASPNET user account did not have the 'Performance Monitor' group. The exception was an access denied when trying to use the Windows registry. After adding the group to ASPNET we started to get the one below.

The exception message and stack is below:

 Message="Access is denied"
 TargetSite="Void RegisterFiles(System.String, Boolean)"
 Stack = at System.Diagnostics.PerformanceCounterLib.RegisterFiles(String arg0, Boolean unregister)
   at System.Diagnostics.PerformanceCounterLib.RegisterCategory(String categoryName, PerformanceCounterCategoryType categoryType, String categoryHelp, CounterCreationDataCollection creationData)
   at System.Diagnostics.PerformanceCounterCategory.Create(String categoryName, String categoryHelp, PerformanceCounterCategoryType categoryType, CounterCreationDataCollection counterData)
   at System.Diagnostics.PerformanceCounterCategory.Create(String categoryName, String categoryHelp, String counterName, String counterHelp)
   at AT.NSA.ANM.parser..ctor()
   at AT.NSA.ANM.parseGNSN..ctor()

Code line is below:

            If Not (PerformanceCounterCategory.Exists("AT.ANM")) Then
                PerformanceCounterCategory.Create("AT.ANM", "AT.ANM performance counters", "Number AT.ANM.Parser objects", "Total number of instantiated parser objects.")
            End If
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