I got a similar error message to this stackoverflow post while running Django on IIS (also forced to do it because of organisational constraints):

ValueError at [url]
underlying buffer has been detached

This error was getting triggered because I had committed a pdb.set_trace() without noticing. It’s a weird one to track down because the page will seem to load normally at first, and then navigating to a subpage will cause the error. Anyway I hope this post helps someone, because googling comes up with f-all helpful.