SharePoint 2013: Can not create a Publishing Portal site

Problem

You have stood up a new SharePoint 2013 farm.  You've provisioned all service applications and configured caching (all types).  You create a new content web application, and then attempt to create a new root site collection based upon the Publishing Portal template from Central Administration.  Both the web application and the root site collection were created through Central Administration.  You see the usual notification in Central Administration indicating that the site collection was created successfully.  However, when you attempt to navigate to the new root site collection, you see the usual.

Troubleshooting

1. Checked ULS: found instances of the following:
   
   

   "System.IO.FileNotFoundException: The system cannot find the file specified. 
   (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070002), StackTrace:..."
    
   UserAgent not available, file operations may not be optimized....
    
   

2. Check Application log: no critical, error or warning events associated with the problem were found.
3. Test other site templates: removed the Publishing Portal site, and then attempted to create root site using Team Site template.  Successful.  Tried using Basic Search template.  Successful.  Then tried again using Publishing template.  Unsuccessful.
4. Reviewed  postings: this posting seemed to indicate a problem with Web.Config.  I recalled that I had edited web.config for the target web application in order to enable BLOB and object caching.  I saved the original before edit it.
5. Re-implement original web.config: after restoring the original, unedited file, I was able to create a root site collection based upon the Publishing Portal template.

Solution

• Restore the original Web.Config file.

References

• SharePoint 2007’s Most Common and Confusing Error
• Could not create publishing site
• Cannot access SharePoint 2013 publishing site
• The DataSourceID of 'TopNavigationMenu' must be the ID of a control of type IHierarchicalDataSource
• Unable to Create Root Site collection with Publishing Portal Template
• The DataSourceID of ‘TopNavigationMenu’ must be the ID of a control of type IHierarchicalDataSource (this is a different article than the one above)