How to disable Visual Studio debugger?

Question

Not to bore you, I'm gonna make long story short. Two machines, identical systems on them, identical programs (mostly). One has Visual Studio installed, one has ... uhmm, something else.

Sometimes when I try to install applications from let's say a CD, Visual Studio's Just-In-Time Debugger pops up, reports an "unhandled win32 exception in ..." and asks whether I want to debug using "New instance of Microsoft VIsual Studio 2010". If I choose Yes, it runs VS, if I choose No it closes the thing, and I'm back in Windows Explorer.

Which would be ok, except I know the application is perfectly all right, and this way I cannot install it (in this latest cast it was the client from my bank for internet banking and paying bills and such).

So, how do I get rid of that thing (just-in-time debugger)?

I don't want to uninstall VS since I'm using it daily, of course.

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Edit 1 :: I tried disabling Just-In-Time debugging in VS's Tools/Options/Debugging/Just-In-Time, then unchecking all three checkmarks, but that just gave another error when trying to run the executable installation program.

An unhandled win32 exception occurred in autorun.exe [some number]. Just-In-Time debugging this exception failed with the following error: No installed debugger has Just-In-Time debugging enabled. In Visual Studio, Just-In-Time debugging can be enabled from ...

Check the documentation index for 'Just-in-time debugging, errors' for more information.

Very informative :/

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Edit 2 :: The application runs fine on the other machine that doesn't have VS installed. To a large extent software on both machines is the same, with just some minor differences (systems installed from image). Minor differences: notepad2, ++, git, ... some small stuff that is left to dev's own choosing.

I don't want this to sound as rant against VS, since I realize it's taking that tone, but I extremelly dislike software that is not self contained and messes other software up. And I had the same problem before with other applications as well. So for now, I'm blaming VS.

If necessary, I'm willing to disable all kinds of debugging for this thing to work permanently (mostly use print statements anyways), if that will help. And if it possible.

Answer 1

regarding the key in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AeDebug and SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Microsoft, I could only change the Auto value from 1 to 0 and it worked.:

REG ADD "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AeDebug" /v Auto /d 0
REG ADD "HKLM\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AeDebug" /v Auto /d 0

Answer 2

This problem was appearing when I started pdf viewer. I reinstalled this program in other folder (another disc in comp) and in my case it worked.

Answer 3

I just had this problem today with Visual Studio 2013. This MSDN article: Just-In-Time Debugging in Visual Studio works for me. In my case, I just rename Debugger to Debugger_del and DbgManagedDebugger to DbgManagedDebugger_del.

To disable Just-In-Time debugging by editing the registry

1. On the Start menu, search for and run regedit.exe

2. In the Registry Editor window, locate and delete the follow registry keys:

   • HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AeDebug\Debugger
   • HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\.NETFramework\DbgManagedDebugger

3. If your computer is running a 64-bit operating system, also delete the following registry keys:

   • HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AeDebug\Debugger

   • HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\.NETFramework\DbgManagedDebugger

4. Take care not to accidentally delete or change any other registry keys.
5. Close the Registy Editor window.

Answer 4

I am adding this response even though this is an old topic because I have just spent most of the day on this very issue and finally solved it. Every solution I found focused on disabling or turning off JIT debugging in Visual Studio, deleting keys from the registry or changing IE script debugging settings. But if you don't have a registered copy of VS, you have a problem. Of course, many of the solutions work in different ways but then you are left with the error above "no installed debugger has just-in-time debugging enabled" which no-one seems to have an answer for. However, the answer is not to disable JIT but rather stop server side debugging in your application. Unless you actually want to do server side debugging it is not necessary for it to be on.

It makes complete sense to me now because I had server side debugging turned on in ASP. Before installing VS, it made no difference because no debugger was assigned to handle the bugs so they were sent to the browser. Once I installed VS, JIT took over and did what tit was supposed to do.

So the quick answer, open IIS, click on default sites or your sites and in your application settings, ASP in my case, turn off server side debugging!!

It may not be everyone's answer, or even the solution to the above problem, but hope it provides more insight to this problem and help someone else.

Answer 5

Right click on Project--Properties. Select the 'Web' tab. Under Debuggers, check 'Silverlight' (beside ASP.NET that is already checked).

Now visual studio won't debug your javascript because fortunately it can't debug Silverlight and javascript at the same time. You can now attach your javascript to the browser debugger.

Answer 6

If you're running the same software on two machines and it's crashing on one(which is what's happening if the debugger is starting) then you probably have something else going wrong on your machine. It could be that you've got driver incompatibility issues, or that some of the other software you have installed on the machine has incompatible versions of dll's...

You need to try to eliminate as many of the differeces as you can (easier said than done, I know)... If you copy the contents of the CD onto a local disk, does that help? If you shutdown your virus checker while you install the software does that help? Does it help if you turn the network off? You've said that both machines have 'mostly' the same, software, what happens if you uninstall some of the differences? Have both machines been patched to the same level?

As Visual studio is trying to start up when you have issues, have a look at the call stack and see what dlls are loaded, print it out... run some of the other software that crashes on that machine and do the same thing... look for any common libraries and do a comparison between the machines to see if they have the same version of the libraries...

Of course it could also be that it's a hardware issue (I've had intermittent failures before now because one of my drives was getting ready to fail and others because my graphics chip was running too hot)...

As I said, not really an answer, but some things to consider...

If all else fails... you're probably stuck doing your bills on the other computer (although another experiment might be to create a VPC on the broken pc to see if it worked then)...