The debugged program window will not be closed

Question

I am using VS 2008 on a 64 bit XP machine. I am debugging a 32-bit C ++ DLL through a console program. DLL and EXE projects are contained in the same SLN as I can modify the DLL during validation.

What happens is that every time I kill a program with Debug | Stop debugging (Shift-F5). VS stops the program, but the console window remains open! If I sit at a breakpoint and press Shift-F5, it will end correctly, but if the program works with a full tilt, when I stop it, I often see this instead.

The big problem is that I cannot close these zombie windows. Using the final task in the task manager does nothing (no message, nothing). When I close the car, it is unable due to orphans, and I have to resort to an actual power outage.

I think this is due to the fact that the DLL and EXE project are in the same SLN, since for several months I worked on this project in two VS instances, one for the DLL and the other for the EXE. I constantly skipped between windows when I was working. This problem never occurred until I included two projects in one SLN. A single SLN works much better, but this anomaly is very annoying.

Any ideas anybody?

UPDATE

After a little search ( here ), I found that it seems to be related to one of the updates from last Tuesday (KB977165 or KB978037). Thanks to Microsoft for its great pre-release testing.

Answer 1

This is KB978037. Removing this issue resolves the issue.

More here

Answer 2

The console windows belong to csrss.exe, which is the system process and in fact the only process that you cannot kill (at least on XP, you can kill other system processes if you do this in the correct order, see the article “Running Windows without service "Mark Russinovich). So, unfortunately, the power cycle seems to be the only way to get rid of console console windows.

Answer 3

I definitely saw oddities when pens were not released, and the task manager did not work correctly. I found that Process Explorer does a great job and finds out what happens to lost windows, file locks and generally strange behavior that happens.

Answer 4

The same thing was starting to happen to me recently. I use the 32-bit version of Windows XP, VS 2008. I do not think that this is due to how your projects are organized. Perhaps the patch installed through Windows Update caused this.

Answer 5

The best I could find was a workaround: binding all the elements to the shift-F5 button. Thus, you basically free the window from the debugger, and you can close the window itself without ending the orphan CMD window. I hope MS comes up with a solution. Tools → Options → Environment → Keyboard.

By the way, the process described above only works sporadically. Since this problem occurs quite often, is there a way to permanently resolve it once and for all?

Answer 6

Mcrosoft acknowledges and describes this issue here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/982551/

They released a fix that you can get: http://support.microsoft.com/hotfix/KBHotfix.aspx?kbnum=982551&kbln=en-us

(you must provide an email address, then send you the password-protected HotFix installer)

Answer 7

Here are some useful solutions.

Alternative: instead of stopping the debugging session by pressing SHIFT-F5, press CTRL-C, which causes the program to terminate, usually eliminating the source of the problem.