Visual Studio Closes Unexpectedly

[Johnson]

I'm not sure if this is an IIS 5.1 issue or ASP.NET issue, or Visual Studio
2008 issue -- thus posting to 3 groups. Please don't be offended.

The problem I'm encountering is that Visual Studio closes unexpectedly and
without any error message being displayed, or error messages written to the
system logs. Visual Studio closes when I attempt to open an ASP.NET Web
application (not Web site) solution for which IIS is set as the project's
Web server. If I switch the project to use the built-in Web server, then
Visual Studio opens with no problem.

How to reproduce.
1. Open Visual Studio 2008 pro to an empty IDE (no solution or project
opened)
2. Create a new ASP.NET Web application project (not Web site).
3. Add some text to default.aspx (e.g., "hello world").
4. Build and run the project (F5).
You will see default.aspx open, displaying the text you entered.
5. Stop debugging (close browser, tell Visual Studio to stop debugging).
6. Open the project's properties, go to the Web tab, and
select the radio button for "Use Local IIS Web server"
7. Save your changes and close the properties page.
If prompted to create the IIS Web site, agree to do so.
This happens only the first time you are doing this.
You can open the IIS console and see that this step has succeeded.
8. Build and run the project. It all works just fine.
9. Close Visual Studio.
10 Reboot the machine (or not - doesn't matter, I've tried both ways here)
11. Open Visual Studio to empty dev environment (no solution or project
opened).
12. Open the ASP.NET Web application project created in Step 2 above.
At this point Visual Studio will just close (disappear from the
screen, with
no error message appearing - it's just gone).
13. Navigate to the .csproj file and open it in notepad (NOT in Visual
Studio).
Find the <UseIIS> element, and change the value from True to False, so
it looks like this: <UseIIS>False</UseIIS>
14. Now try to open the project again (do steps 11 and 12 again).
This time it opens just fine (no error message).

My development box is configured as such: XP Pro/SP3 with IIS installed and
verified to be running just fine; Visual Studio 2008 Professional with
Service Pack 1. This is a brand new image. I zeroed out the hard drive plus
partitioned and plus formatted it before and installing a fresh copy of XP
Pro. I have installed all of the latest updates and patches from Windows
Update. I have installed .NET Framework 3.5 + it's SP1. None of this
apparently matters, though, because the problem described above happened on
the old image (before I zeroed out the hard drive, formatted, it, and
reinstalled everything). The old image had XP Pro sP2 and Visual Studio 2008
Pro with no SP. Now with everything reinstalled from scratch, it's still
doing this. It's actually a bit worse, because every other time,
approximately, that I try to run the application using the built-in Web
server, the IDE crashes with an error message stating that Visual Studio was
unable to connect to the built-in Web server.

Any ideas or suggestions for resolution? I don't want to reimage, as doing
so apparently has no effect on this problem.

Thanks.

 

[David Wang]

I'm not sure if this is an IIS 5.1 issue or ASP.NET issue, or Visual Studio
2008 issue -- thus posting to 3 groups. Please don't be offended.

The problem I'm encountering is that Visual Studio closes unexpectedly and
without any error message being displayed, or error messages written to the
system logs. Visual Studio closes when I attempt to open an ASP.NET Web
application (not Web site) solution for which IIS is set as the project's
Web server. If I switch the project to use the built-in Web server, then
Visual Studio opens with no problem.

How to reproduce.
1. Open Visual Studio 2008 pro to an empty IDE (no solution or project
opened)
2. Create a new ASP.NET Web application project (not Web site).
3. Add some text to default.aspx (e.g., "hello world").
4. Build and run the project (F5).
    You will see default.aspx open, displaying the text you entered.
5. Stop debugging (close browser, tell Visual Studio to stop debugging).
6. Open the project's properties, go to the Web tab, and
    select the radio button for "Use Local IIS Web server"
7. Save your changes and close the properties page.
    If prompted to create the IIS Web site, agree to do so.
    This happens only the first time you are doing this.
   You can open the IIS console and see that this step has succeeded.
8. Build and run the project. It all works just fine.
9. Close Visual Studio.
10 Reboot the machine (or not - doesn't matter, I've tried both ways here)
11. Open Visual Studio to empty dev environment (no solution or project
opened).
12. Open the ASP.NET Web application project created in Step 2 above.
      At this point Visual Studio will just close (disappear from the
screen, with
      no error message appearing - it's just gone).
13. Navigate to the .csproj file and open it in notepad (NOT in Visual
Studio).
      Find the <UseIIS> element, and change the value from True to False, so
      it looks like this: <UseIIS>False</UseIIS>
14. Now try to open the project again (do steps 11 and 12 again).
     This time it opens just fine (no error message).

My development box is configured as such: XP Pro/SP3 with IIS installed and
verified to be running just fine; Visual Studio 2008 Professional with
Service Pack 1. This is a brand new image. I zeroed out the hard drive plus
partitioned and plus formatted it before and installing a fresh copy of XP
Pro. I have installed all of the latest updates and patches from Windows
Update. I have installed .NET Framework 3.5 + it's SP1. None of this
apparently matters, though, because the problem described above happened on
the old image (before I zeroed out the hard drive, formatted, it, and
reinstalled everything). The old image had XP Pro sP2 and Visual Studio 2008
Pro with no SP. Now with everything reinstalled from scratch, it's still
doing this. It's actually a bit worse, because every other time,
approximately, that I try to run the application using the built-in Web
server, the IDE crashes with an error message stating that Visual Studio was
unable to connect to the built-in Web server.

Any ideas or suggestions for resolution? I don't want to reimage, as doing
so apparently has no effect on this problem.

Thanks.

Thanks for coming up with the detailed repro steps. This sounds like a
fantastic bug to file against Visual Studio, perhaps via a route like
Microsoft Connect. Or contacting Microsoft PSS since clearly the crash
is in a Microsoft product.

Only by digging into the crash dump of Visual Studio can one figure
out if the issue is actually caused by VS, ASP.Net, IIS, or something
else. But first investigation has to start with Visual Studio since it
is the program that is crashing and generating the crash dump.


//David
http://w3-4u.blogspot.com
http://blogs.msdn.com/David.Wang
//

 

[Johnson]

For those interested in the resolution: The cause of this exotic problem is
that my antivirus software (Panda Antivirus 2008) was loading one of it's
dlls (pavlsp.dll) into the process along with devenv.exe (Visual Studio) and
causing the process to crash. Merely disabling Panda Antivirus was not
sufficient to cause the problem to go away. Instead, I uninstalled it (using
Panda's own uninstall utility) and then the problem went away entirely
(i.e,. Visual Studio would no longer fail as described in the OP).

The way I discovered that pavlsp.dll was crashing the process was through
the assistance of some very helpful Microsoft support folks. They installed
DebugDiag 1.1 (Debug Diagnostics Tool) onto the computer. That utility then
created some enormous log files (apparentlyl logs of all memory access) and
then had me upload them for further analysis. Those logs showed pavlsp.dll
as the problem here. Visual Studio was not, itself, choking in any way.

- HTH

I'm not sure if this is an IIS 5.1 issue or ASP.NET issue, or Visual
Studio
2008 issue -- thus posting to 3 groups. Please don't be offended.

The problem I'm encountering is that Visual Studio closes unexpectedly and
without any error message being displayed, or error messages written to
the
system logs. Visual Studio closes when I attempt to open an ASP.NET Web
application (not Web site) solution for which IIS is set as the project's
Web server. If I switch the project to use the built-in Web server, then
Visual Studio opens with no problem.

How to reproduce.
1. Open Visual Studio 2008 pro to an empty IDE (no solution or project
opened)
2. Create a new ASP.NET Web application project (not Web site).
3. Add some text to default.aspx (e.g., "hello world").
4. Build and run the project (F5).
You will see default.aspx open, displaying the text you entered.
5. Stop debugging (close browser, tell Visual Studio to stop debugging).
6. Open the project's properties, go to the Web tab, and
select the radio button for "Use Local IIS Web server"
7. Save your changes and close the properties page.
If prompted to create the IIS Web site, agree to do so.
This happens only the first time you are doing this.
You can open the IIS console and see that this step has succeeded.
8. Build and run the project. It all works just fine.
9. Close Visual Studio.
10 Reboot the machine (or not - doesn't matter, I've tried both ways here)
11. Open Visual Studio to empty dev environment (no solution or project
opened).
12. Open the ASP.NET Web application project created in Step 2 above.
At this point Visual Studio will just close (disappear from the
screen, with
no error message appearing - it's just gone).
13. Navigate to the .csproj file and open it in notepad (NOT in Visual
Studio).
Find the <UseIIS> element, and change the value from True to False, so
it looks like this: <UseIIS>False</UseIIS>
14. Now try to open the project again (do steps 11 and 12 again).
This time it opens just fine (no error message).

My development box is configured as such: XP Pro/SP3 with IIS installed
and
verified to be running just fine; Visual Studio 2008 Professional with
Service Pack 1. This is a brand new image. I zeroed out the hard drive
plus
partitioned and plus formatted it before and installing a fresh copy of XP
Pro. I have installed all of the latest updates and patches from Windows
Update. I have installed .NET Framework 3.5 + it's SP1. None of this
apparently matters, though, because the problem described above happened
on
the old image (before I zeroed out the hard drive, formatted, it, and
reinstalled everything). The old image had XP Pro sP2 and Visual Studio
2008
Pro with no SP. Now with everything reinstalled from scratch, it's still
doing this. It's actually a bit worse, because every other time,
approximately, that I try to run the application using the built-in Web
server, the IDE crashes with an error message stating that Visual Studio
was
unable to connect to the built-in Web server.

Any ideas or suggestions for resolution? I don't want to reimage, as doing
so apparently has no effect on this problem.

Thanks.

Thanks for coming up with the detailed repro steps. This sounds like a
fantastic bug to file against Visual Studio, perhaps via a route like
Microsoft Connect. Or contacting Microsoft PSS since clearly the crash
is in a Microsoft product.

Only by digging into the crash dump of Visual Studio can one figure
out if the issue is actually caused by VS, ASP.Net, IIS, or something
else. But first investigation has to start with Visual Studio since it
is the program that is crashing and generating the crash dump.


//David
http://w3-4u.blogspot.com
http://blogs.msdn.com/David.Wang
//

 

[David Wang]

Glad to hear of your resolution.

Yes, using a tool like DebugDiag is a generally helpful
troubleshooting step, especially when you can reproduce a crash/hang/
issue reliably. At that point, a debugger can make short work of
determining the issue's culprit.

The file you uploaded is likely the memory dump file resulting from
the crash. DebugDiag's human-readable report is based on heuristic
analysis of the memory dump file, but a trained person can usually
make better sense/recommendation of that same memory dump.


//David
http://w3-4u.blogspot.com
http://blogs.msdn.com/David.Wang
//