Why can’t I debug from Visual Studio 2005 after installing IE8?

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A colleague of mine was having similar issues and found this:

IE 8 has a feature called Loosely-Coupled Internet Explorer (LCIE) which results in IE running across multiple processes.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/beta/readiness/developers-existing.aspx#lcie

Older versions of the Visual Studio Debugger get confused by this and cannot figure out how to attach to the correct process. You can work around this by disabling the process growth feature of LCIE. Here’s how:

  1. Open RegEdit
  2. Browse to HKEY_LOCALMACHINE -> SOFTWARE -> Microsoft -> Internet Explorer -> Main
  3. Add a dword under this key called TabProcGrowth
  4. Set TabProcGrowth to 0

Since you are running on Windows Server 2003, this is all you should need to do. If you run into the same problem on Vista or newer, you will also need to turn off protected mode.

Credit: Brad Sullivan, Program Manager, Visual Studio Debugger, MSFT

Source: http://social.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vsdebug/thread/e2c795cd-b7a0-4fad-b7c9-b1ca40d7302e

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