Why does Windows Explorer search freeze when I have an unrelated program paused in a debugger

Question

While debugging my program, whether it's an ASP.NET application or a .NET console EXE and I have the debugger paused at a breakpoint I try to find a file in Windows Explorer. Either pressing WinKey+F or selecting search from the context menu freezes Windows Explorer - until I resume the program being debugged.

My program has nothing to do with Windows Explorer! In fact, this happens in Visual Studio 2008 even with the simplest console EXE (WriteLine and ReadLine). I can't repro it with this simple EXE in WinDbg, but it does happen in with WinDb debugging an ASP.NET app. Why does this happen and how do I fix it? It's bloody annoying, especially when you don't realise what's going on.

This is on Windows XP x64 SP2, running a .NET 3.5 application.

Answer 1

I remember reading a blog post (long time ago) about this. This was it I think: Why the Visual Studio debugger occasionally locks up the entire Windows GUI

Apparently due to some shared mutex which the text services used, there was some deadlock in the GUI.

Hope that helps.