I (along with a good few others, I think) had a most peculiar problem yesterday. Visual Studio refused to debug. To be precise, it crashed with a SEHException whenever it tried to open a file while debugging. Initially, I assumed it was my fat fingers that had caused the problem, so I deleted everything in the project’s object folders and tried again: no go. Next, I reset the experimental hive in the registry: no go. Then reboot: no go.
I this point I was contemplating a complete reinstall of Visual Studio and beginning to get a bit panicky. I had bugs to fix and a business to run and re-installing Visual Studio is usually a couple of hours work and not something I wanted to do.
Fortunately, I did a Google search for SEHException and Visual Studio - and found that not a few had been there before me. It turns out that the problem was caused by Trusteer Rapport – a normally docile security program for protecting banking passwords. I uninstalled Rapport and all was well.
Now I’m extremely careful about installing any software on my production systems – I’ve been bitten too often by beta software which has unexpected results. He who installs beta software on a production system gets what he deserves, in my view. I’m also careful about installing bling – if it isn’t needed, I don’t install it. But this one – a previously perfectly functioning program that suddenly zaps a debug session in a totally unrelated piece of software - is new to me. God only knows how the person who came up with the fix of removing Rapport did it, but he has saved me - and others - a good deal of time and trouble.
I suspect that the only way round this sort of thing is to have a really efficient “bare-metal” virtualization system such as Hyper V or VMware. I’m no expert concerning virtual machines, but I’ve used both Microsoft’s Virtual PC and VMware Workstation with good effect. There are rumours that Windows 8 will have Hyper V and if so, and it’s efficient with the graphics, I’d be first to upgrade. The connections between software components is getting so complicated and involved that it’s becoming impossible to disentangle the parts. I suspect it’s going to get a good deal worse.
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