Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Occassional VS.NET 2008 lockup on build

A few weeks ago I started having sleep and shutdown issues with my development machine which was running Windows XP. Faced with the prospect of having to re-image the machine I decided to bite the bullet and install the Windows 7 Enterprise disk that we had recently received from Microsoft.

I've been very impressed with Windows 7 and now prefer it to XP, but I did start getting occasional lockups when building DLLs in VS.NET 2008. When these lockups occurred the only way I could kill the devenv.exe process was to logout.

At first, after doing some initial searches on the issue, I assumed this was just a Windows 7 problem that I'd have to ignore until VS.NET 2010 was released or Windows 7 SP1. Today I decided that enough was enough and proceeded to find a solution, which turned out to be pretty easy.

The problem was with the AVG 9 resident shield process (avgrsx.exe) which was trying to scan DLLs as VS.NET copied them. This was causing avgrsx.exe use 50% CPU and to lock Visual Studio. After killing this process VS.NET came back to life and continued building my project. To fix this conflict I opened the resident shield settings and put in an exception for my VS.NET projects root directory.

Though this was an easy fix I didn't spot it right away due to the differences in the way Task Manager works in XP and 7. On XP I was used to always seeing all processes from all users, but on Windows 7 I have to click the "Show processes from all users" every single time. This is a minor annoyance, but not enough to turn me off of Windows 7.