Prevent Visual Studio from trying to load symbols for a particular DLL

Question

I have Visual Studio 2005 set up to use Microsoft's symbol servers. I also have UltraMon installed, which injects a hook DLL into every process. Whenever I start debugging my MFC application, VS says:

"Loading symbols for C:\Program Files\UltraMon\RTSUltraMonHookX32.dll..."

for anything from the blink of an eye to several tens of seconds. It's never going to find those symbols... can I tell it not to bother looking?

(I tried creating an empty RTSUltraMonHookX32.pdb, but VS sees that it's no good and carries on looking.)

Answer 1

You can't do this in a very fine grained fashion but you can disable automatic symbol loading and then manually choose the symbols to load via the Modules window (Debug -> Windows -> Modules).

To Disable Automatic Symbol loading

• Tools -> Options -> Debugging -> Symbols
• Check "Search the above locations only when symbols are loaded manually"

Answer 2

Also check that you have no "_NT_SYMBOL_PATH" environment variable. If you have this var symbols will load regardless of VS settings.

Answer 3

You can also set up symbol server exclusions which will not be attempted to download in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Symbol Server\Exclusions or possibly also HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Symbol Server\Exclusions or via a .ini file at %WINDIR%\system32\inetsrv\Symsrv.ini (use the header [exclusions] and put each exclusion on its own line). The exclusions are simple pattern matches, so use msxml5.* for example.