Debugging in visual studio 2008 freezes entire system

Question

Any time i try to debug in visual studio 2008 my entire system will freeze whenever a breakpoint is hit.

I can move the mouse around and that remains responsive but nothing i click on does anything, I can bring up the task manager but can't do anything with it and i am able to lock/unlock the machine.

I tried a fix that i found via google that suggested i disable advanced text services but it didn't work. I am using visual studio 2008 with SP1 running on Windows XP Pro, asking here is my last hope before formating/reinstalling so i hope someone can help me out.

I debug by running the application in debug mode, the freeze happens no matter what the project size and it seems as if it is just the entire GUI that freezes, the computer carries on working just fine i just can't do anything with it because the GUI is totaly unresponsive.

Answer 1

I found I only had this issue when I was using the keyboard to debug. If I used the toolbar debug buttons, I didn't have an issue.

To "fix" this, I set the LowLevelHooksTimeout to 300ms (from 5000ms). You may need to add the DWORD if it isn't already there.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Control Panel\Desktop\LowLevelHooksTimeout

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\LowLevelHooksTimeout

Restart after making this change for good measure.

Answer 2

How big is the project you are running? When I did a Find last night on a huge open source project, I got kind of the same behavior.

Also, did you try Uninstalling just VS2008, then Reinstalling with only the options you use.

Answer 3

Have you tried disabling "Call ToString()" debugger option? This is ON by default, and is known to deadlock.