Error: could not find Coldfusion component when trying to run CF Admin

Bear with me ... this is confusing!
My local webserver is IIS. The home dir for the default website was set to c:\inetpub\wwwroot\cwa.
The cwa directory contains all of the files for my website. I set it up this way to mimic the directory structure on my host server.
After I did this, I also had to copy the CFIDE directory into c:\inetpub\wwwroot\cwa in order to get to the CF Administrator via http://localhost/CFIDE/administrator/index.cfm. Fine. No problem there.

However, I now have a second website on my local pc, in c:\inetpub\wwwroot\omc. I'm trying to set up a ColdFusion datasource for a MySQL database, and so need to get into CF Admin. Now that I'm older and wiser, I realized that I really never needed to copy the CFIDE dir into cwa. I could have just gone in to IIS and set the home dir for the default web site to c:\inetpub\wwwroot to access the CFIDE directory that is there.

That works, I can open CF Admin.

BUT ... and here's the confusing part ... I then went ahead and deleted the CFIDE directory in c:\inetpub\wwwroot\cwa. With my home dir still set in IIS to c:\inetpub\wwwroot, I try to get to CF Admin via http://localhost/CFIDE/administrator/index.cfm. Now I get the error:

                    "could not find ColdFusion component CFIDE.adminapi.administrator"

Through lots of trial and error, I've discoverd that if I move the CFIDE dir back into c:\inetpub\wwwroot\cwa, and reboot the pc, I can then get to CF Admin EITHER with home dir set to c:\inetpub\wwwroot OR to c:\inetpub\wwwroot\cwa. But as soon as I move CFIDE out of the cwa dir, there is no way that I can access the CF Admin.

Further, if I set the homedir to "c:\inetupb\wwwroot\omc", I can NOT open CF Admin but the error is different: it's "File not found: /CFIDE/administrator.index.cfm". Now, this is one thing that DOES make sense to me since there is no CFIDE dir under omc.

Furthermore, on a hunch, I renamed the CFIDE directory that is in "c:\inetpub\wwwroot" to see if that would still let me access CF Admin with home dir set to "c:\inetpub\wwwroot". It won't. So it seems that "something" is looking for files BOTH in c:\inetpub\wwwroot AND in c:\inetpub\wwwroot\cwa. Now to recover from this rename, I set the name back to CFIDE but then I also had to reboot my pc.

So what am I missing? I searched the registry for "CFIDE" to see if there was some stuck setting but couldn't find anything obvious.

The ultimate question is: Why is it, that, with the homedir set to "c:\inetpub\wwwroot", I cannot open CF Admin UNLESS the CFIDE files are in BOTH "c:\inetpub\wwwroot" AND in  "c:\inetpub\wwwroot\cwa" ?
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