Thursday, December 10, 2009

Visual Studios debugger automatically stopping when IE comes up.

I installed IE8 and the debugger in Visual Studios stopped working. I found this solution on the interwebs and it worked for my system (Visual Studio 2003, WinXP):

IE 8 has a feature called Loosely-Coupled Internet Explorer (LCIE) which results in IE running across multiple processes.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/beta/readiness/developers-existing.aspx#lcie

Older versions of the Visual Studio Debugger get confused by this and cannot figure out how to attach to the correct process. You can work around this by disabling the process growth feature of LCIE. Here's how:

1.Open RegEdit
2.Browse to HKEY_LOCALMACHINE -> SOFTWARE -> Microsoft -> Internet Explorer -> Main
3.Add a dword under this key called TabProcGrowth
4.Set TabProcGrowth to 0
Since you are running on Windows Server 2003, this is all you should need to do. If you run into the same problem on Vista or newer, you will also need to turn off protected mode.

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