VS 2003 hangs after installing Windows XP Service Pack 2 ?

[Andrea Vincenzi]

Help me please, I'm totally stuck!
My Visual Studio 2003 debugger stopped working after I installed
Windows XP Service Pack 2. Here is what happens (with any project,
even a "Hello, world" message): the first time I open a project and
try to start it in debug mode, Visual Studio hangs before executing
the first line of code. The only way to stop it is to kill the process
using the Task Manager.
If I open the same project a second time and try to execute or build
it, I get two build errors (substitute xxx with my application name):

"Could not copy temporary files to the output directory"
"The file ‘xxx.exe' cannot be copied to the run directory. The process
cannot access the file because it is being used by another proc"

This is probably just a side effect, due to the fact that on the first
execution attempt the two files "xxx.exe" and "xxx.pdb" have been
created, and now they are locked.

I'm almost sure that this behavior was caused by the installation of
Windows XP Service pack 2, because before that everything was working
fine. This is not the sort of thing that makes a developer happy,
especially when he's on a tight schedule…

 

[Imran Koradia]

Well, I'm not sure what sort of setup you have but I installed XP SP2 as
well and my VS 2003 ran fine - no problems whatsoever - atleast for now. Any
group policies on the folder where you have your project that might be
affecting this? However, if you are on a really tight schedule, you might
want to go ahead and uninstall the Service pack. Just a suggestion.
Otherwise, hope this issue is resolved for you.

Imran.

 

[Mick Doherty]

I'm not experiencing any problems with XP service pack 2 + VS2003

 

[Jonathan Preston]

I've got this problem as well. When I try to remove or uninstall
Visual Studio the process hangs.

Can anybody out there help.

 

[Andrea Vincenzi]

I think I have found what was causing the problem. While I was trying
to make two of my computers talk to each other, one of the usual
Norton Internet Security 2004 pop-up windows appeared, telling me that
another system was trying to access the web server on my computer.

Usually when the request comes from an external system I say "block",
but in this case since the request came from a local system I said
"allow".

At this point an unexpected thing happened: the property window of a
folder, that I had requested about one hour before, appeared on my pc.
Since this (seeing properties of files and folders) was another of the
things that apparently didn't work after installing Windows XP SP2, I
thought that it might be connected to the behavior of Visual Studio,
and –BANG- it sure was!

I tried to start several Visual Studio applications in debug mode and
they work… so now maybe I can finally finish my work that has been
waiting for three weeks.
Here are some more details about the rule that was created by Norton
Internet Security:

Incoming TCP connection
Local address, service: (my_pc_name(192.168.0.1),http(80))
Remote address, service: (192.168.0.2,1039)
Process name: "C:\WINDOWS\System32\inetsrv\inetinfo.exe"

Please note that I have disabled the firewall that comes with Windows
XP SP2, and I continue to use Norton Internet Security 2004, as
suggested by the Symantec site. I haven't been able to do more testing
with firewall rules to determine exactly what is causing the behavior,
but I hope that his information will prove useful to other people who
have the same problem.

 

[Jonathan Preston]

I've also found a problem with IIS since installing service pack 2. I
am unable to stop the service or load it to alter properties.

If I disable IIS in msconfig -> services and reboot then Visual Studio
works fine.

Anybody any ideas why IIS is not working?

Jon