Visual Studio 6.0 hangs Windows XP SP1

[Martin Kochanski]

I am building a moderately large project using Visual C++ 6.0
Professional Edition on Windows XP Pro SP1.

Often, when the build reports "Linking...", Windows XP hangs. That is,
not only is Visual Studio itself unresponsive, so is the whole of the
rest of Windows. Or rather, it is nearly hung. Clicking on a different
taskbar button takes 20-30 seconds to generate visual feedback and (as
far as I can tell) infinitely long to perform the task switch itself.
Ctrl+Alt+Del, which should bring up a very-high-priority task, works
extremely slowly also.

Eventually (after about five minutes) the link completes and everything
starts working normally again. But clearly this makes Windows XP Pro
pretty unusable for software development (I'm sticking to Windows 98,
which is fast and works).

I have a suspicion that this problem began with Service Pack 1 of
Windows XP.

- Has anyone else come across this problem?
- Does anyone have any idea what is causing it? I thought it was meant
to be impossible for one application to hang the whole of Windows...
- Does anyone know any way of stopping this from happening?

 

[Stuart]

Yes it does! It only runs with updates - download the latest VS service pack
from MS and it should be ok (ish)

 

[Martin Kochanski]

The most recent service pack for Visual Studio 6.0 I can find is SP5,
which dates back to August 2000 & which I'm already using!

 

[Stuart]

Sorry to hear that - SP5 got it running for me.

The most recent service pack for Visual Studio 6.0 I can find is SP5,
which dates back to August 2000 & which I'm already using!

 

[Roland Hall]

What is your SP version of VS?
What brand computer are you using?

Roland

 

[Jeremy]

I have a similar issue, but the problem of windows 'almost hung'
occurs ocassionally (and apparently randomly) after a breakpoint is
hit during debugging. I'm using VC++6 (SP5) and XP Pro (SP1) on a
highly spec'ed machine (my colleagues are using various machines of
other specs and are also seeing this behaviour).

I'm looking for a soln too. It worked fine with Win2000 - problem
appears with XP SP1 (we never had XP with no SP's)...