The aspnet_wp process doesn't die, since it is continuously being used.
IIS is it's parent process, though. Killing the process in a
production environment is not a wise idea, there are a number of mission
critical applications that are dependant upon their session states being
persisted. The majority of my sites are ASP.NET based.
It is better to restart IIS at a time where the server load is low,
which automatically kills the aspnet_wp process. IIS will then spawn
that process at the next time an ASP.NET app is spawned.
The reason why I asked the question is that I didn't know if the process
re-loaded the configuration or not. After some searching, it appears
that the configuration is loaded only when the process spawns. The
specific part (processModel) pertains directly to the aspnet_wp process
itself, and can't be included in a web.config file, for instance. I
wouldn't say that the structure of the machine.config file is designed
very well, since there are a number of reconfigurable elements in there
that can be included in the web.config file, but some can't.