Visual Studio problem

[longshanksAOC]

I'm having a recent problem that I can't understand. Any time I debug an application, in either VS2003 or VS2005 Express, when it hits a breakpoint or an error it hangs my computer. The cpu load almost maxes out completely.
Does anyone know of a cause for this and how I can fix it? I really don't want to have to reinstall my OS cause everything else seems fine.

[Marine]

It should eventually go to the debugger...

[Mike Durand]

Does this happen only when debugging your mod? What happens if you try to set a breakpoint inside of a test project?

[longshanksAOC]

No this happens no matter what im working on, it only started recently actually (ever since I installed vs2005 express) I'm not sure if maybe it is conflicting somehow with vs2003?

[lodle]

yep most likely is the cause

[Marine]

Most likely it doesn't know what debugger to use (It usually pops up a window, if you are in full screen mode it wont show it), to choose...

I think you can uninstall 2003's JIT debugger or the other way around depending on what you use.

[Ging]

I've not had a single issue caused by having VSE and VS2003 installed on the same machine - in fact, right now, I have 2003, 2005 and a version of express installed... Nothing wrong with any of them, I'd recommend you try re-installing both versions and see if that fixes it.

[Marine]

Ging, what im saying is, if he's not debugging it directly though the debugger (I.e. he hasnt attached to the hl2.exe process), it will pop up a window under the game asking what debugger to use. This looks like it crashes and hangs.

[longshanksAOC]

I debug my program straight thru VS so the process should be auto-attached.. but like i said whenever it hits a crash or breakpoint the little window where it says break continue end etc does show up, but I have no mouse focus to it and the whole system comes to a crawl.. I can't even close apps using task manager. I'm not really sure what is going on, it wasn't doing this a few weeks ago.

[longshanksAOC]

After some heavy googling I was able to find this forum thread:
http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PageIndex=2&SiteID=1&PostID=1719396
which showed people having similar issues.

I was able to solve this problem by disabling msctf.dll which apparently causes some global semaphore issues or something, causing the system to halt in the debugger. Anyway here are the steps to fix for anyone else who encounters this.

To disable msctf.dll you will also be disabling the language bar. Go to start -> settings -> control panel -> regional and language options. Go to Languages -> Details -> Advanced. Place a check in Turn off advanced text services.