I found a way around the MVC4 Web.config content-blocking problem

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6279643/prevent-iis-from-serving-static-files-through-asp-net-pipeline has a pretty good cheat sheet how to get around the problem I detail here. The two steps are:

1. Download and run this update for IIS 7.0 and IIS 7.5: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/980368
2. Replace true with false in this line of the Web.config file:
   <modules runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests="true">

 
 

This allowed me to get an MVC4 application working without content being blocked. The master page stuff still doesn't want to work for me, but I think that is a different MVC4 problem