Visual Studio 2015 freezes after trying to exit the debug session of a C# project

Question

I'm having a strange problem for about two weeks with my visual studio installation. I am on VS2015 Update 3 and Windows 10 1903 working with C# behind a proxy.

The problem? Every time I try to stop debugging, Visual Studio freezes. Sometimes a window from visual studio pops up that the process hangs and I can try to kill it (that does not always work). Sometimes this window is not shown at all. Most of the time I end up killing VS with Sysinternals ProcessExplorer - and I get the message that the process of my debugged project could not be killed (access denied, even as admin). I start VS again, trying to execute/debug my project - but that fails, since the process of the project is still alive and VS can't overwrite the executable. Cleaning the project helps sometimes, but other times I end up starting/restarting VS multiple times, killing processes with ProcessExplorer until I can start the next debug session and everything starts from the beginning.

What have I tried?

• Disabled .vshost Process
• Internet Explorer > Advanced Settings > Security > Certificate Stuff disabled
• Detaching the debugger first works in most cases
• Disabled my network card. This seems to work but is not really a solution
• Visual Studio repair installation
• Disabled all plugins/extensions/addons (LanceLi-MSFT)
• Cleared VS component cache (LanceLi-MSFT)
• Installed this Patch (LanceLi-MSFT)

ideas and suggestions are welcome :)

Answer 1

Use Process Monitor to observe the system calls Visual Studio (devenv.exe) makes. Look for file system calls that are doing lots of reads (eg, on the Browse.VC.db file which is a symptom of this issue currently under investigation ).

Perhaps you'll see a read of a file that you can fix with a configuration change. If not and it looks like a bug, report a problem to microsoft using Help > Send Feedback > Report a Problem... .