Here’s something very weird. I’m doing some updates to West Wind Web Monitor which is a .NET 1.1 application for monitoring Web sites.

So I’m running on Vista Beta 2 and I’m in the middle of debugging some email server connection issues. So I’m firing up the debugger frequently to run this application and drill into the email code. A few tries later all of a sudden debugging no longer works.

I start debugging and the EXE starts running but no UI comes up when running in the debugger. The code just seems to get completely stuck. Oddly when not running under the debugger it works just fine. I even went as far as putting a break point into the first line of startup code and even that doesn’t fire – it never seems to get there.

So I’m banging my head against the wall wondering WTF changed in the last 20 minutes that would cause debugging to fail and standalone to run…

So by chance, I turned off Media Player which I happened to have running with tunes in the background. And lo and behold that’s the damn problem. As soon as Media Player is shut down the app starts properly in debug mode. Start it back up and run the app - fails again. Media Player is causing this application not to run in Debug mode…

Aaargh. That’s a royal pain. Even funnier, it also causes problems when I want to start a debug session and an outlook message or messenger ping comes in which also play sound – presumably using media services. Same thing, the debug session never gets off the ground.

Very strange… But oh no there’s no tight integration between components in Windows is there?  <g>

Seems this is specific to VS2003 - in VS2005 other programs works -I haven't ported this app over there to see if it's something specific to this app. But with this app it's definitiely consistent.

Well, this is one of the last .NET 1.x apps I have left - mainly because .NET 1.1 ships with Win2003 which is the target of this app, so it's nice not to require any additional install.