Stack overflow in .NET sends IIS to 100% CPU usage - why no StackOverflowException?

I had some code in an ASP.NET application running on Server 2008 R2 + IIS 7.5. Whenever I loaded a particular page, it would hang forever and send IIS to 100% CPU usage. I eventually tracked down the problem.

public string Comments
{
    get { return this.Comments; }
}

Oops - should have been return this.Photo.Comments. So, my question is, why didn't .NET generate a StackOverflowException, but instead let IIS run at 100% CPU for far longer than it should have taken. In my experience programming with .NET, it takes seconds or less to get a StackOverflowException when doing something like the above. So how could it still be running for almost 30 minutes on IIS?