Visual Studio 2010 takes too long loading symbols, symbol file location cannot be removed

Question

Visual Studio takes a lot of extra time loading symbols for external dlls which I'd rather not load. I have fiddled with my symbol settings in VS2008 and these settings seem to be affecting VS2010

How do I stop it loading 3rd party symbols?
I've tried:

• devenv /resetuserdata
• Tools > Options > Debugging > Symbols (I can't remove or uncheck the pdb file location of: "Environment Variable: _NT_SYMBOL_PATH")
• I've cleared the above location like so: set _NT_SYMBOL_PATH=
  actually this made a huge difference (it was previously SRVc:\symbolshttp://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols)
• I've deleted everything from: %localappdata%\Temp\Temporary ASP.NET Files\root\

The next thing would be a VS re-install, failing that an OS re-install, but if it saves me 14 seconds every time I press debug it would be worth it.

Answer 1

I had this trouble too. And I fix it easily. Just do: Debug->Options and Settings->Symbols. In Symbols I checked Only Specified Modules. Everything works fine again. Hope this helps.

Answer 2

For me, I had previously turned on Debugging -> Symbols -> All modules and forgot to turn it off when I was done with a particular project. Turning off this setting greatly improved my load times.

Answer 3

I had this trouble too. I did not think that I had set _NT_SYMBOL_PATH but somehow it was set to the path I use when using WinDbg. I figured this out by running ProcMon from the SysInternals Suite and filtered out everything except DevEnv.exe and saw what files it was trying to access when debugging my application.

I deleted the _NT_SYMBOL_PATH environmental, restarted VS and everything runs like it should.

I offer this not so much for the answer which was supplied in the initial question but as guidance on how to figure out what was wrong.

Answer 4

Try Debug -> Delete All Breakpoints

Answer 5

Things to try

• Tools > Options Debugging > General
  • Disable source server support
  • Enable just my code(just tested and greatly improved load times for me) -when to disable
  • Disable .NET framework source stepping (automatically disables just my code if selected)
• Tools > Options>Debugging > Symbols
  • Only Specified Modules
  • Or All modules unless excluded and exclude those 3rd party
  • I was able to remove all checks under .pdb locations, but I had d:\refsrc\symbols as an added location