I have spent days trying to figure out why my Visual Studio 2003 debugger hangs when trying to debug an ASP.NET application. The symptoms are that after pressing the debug button the application will act like it is going to get into debug mode, but it hangs somewhere in the process, never quite launching the application and never quite returning back to normal when the stop debugging button is pressed.

The error message I was receiving said something like "Auto-attach to process" aspnet_wp.exe Failed. Error code 0x80010012.

After searching and searching newsgroups online, I finally found one small line of advice that solved all of the problems. It simply read: "Sometimes enabling Unmanaged Debugging in your ASP.NET project settings will cause Visual Studio to hang." Walla! Eureka! that was it!

Last week I was trying to debug some historical COM objects and tried turning on this option to see if I could step into that code. However, I had forgotten that I had enabled this and have been struggling ever since.

Praise the Lord for this person who left the advice above. You made my week!