Why Does Debugging Keep Popping Up?

The Just-In-Time debugging prompt can pop up continuously if you're using a program or an Internet add-on that is experiencing problems. These pop-ups tend to be very persistent, and you may find them annoying if you cannot troubleshoot the program yourself. By gaining a better understanding of this service, you can learn how to disable it.

Just In Time Debugging

Just-In-Time debugging is a service that watches for errors in programs that you create in Microsoft Visual Studio. This service generates a pop-up when the program you're testing encounters a critical error. If you click "OK," the service will launch Visual Studio and display the program's code if available. In this way, you can save time when debugging your programs because you won't have to open Visual Studio yourself each time the program that you're testing crashes.

Disabling Debugging for Internet Explorer

If an Internet Explorer add-on was created by Visual Studio, its default behavior will prompt you to debug it when it crashes, even if you didn't develop the add-on. You may find this very frustrating if you can't do anything to debug the program yourself. To prevent this from happening, click "Start," "Control Panel," Network and Internet" and then "Internet Options." Click the "Advanced" tab. Then select the "Disable Script Debugging (Internet Explorer)" check box. Also select the "Disable Script Debugging (Others)" check box. Click "OK" to complete the process.

Setting Debugging Options for Visual Studio

Setting your Just-In-Time debugging preferences in the Control Panel should prevent Internet-related debugging pop-ups, but you may still receive them when using other applications. To prevent them altogether, you can disable the service from within Visual Studio itself. To do so, start Visual Studio, click "Tools" and then "Options." Click the "Debugging" tab when the "Options" dialog box loads, and then click the "Just-In-Time" tab. Point the mouse cursor to the "Enable Just-In-Time debugging of these types of code" header, deselect the "Script, " "Managed" and "Native" check boxes and then click "OK."

Debugging Options in the Registry

If you use Visual Studio or if you've installed the .NET framework, you'll find two keys in your registry that can cause these pop-ups. While it's safe to delete these keys, edit the registry only as a last resort. To delete the first, click "Start," type "regedit" into the search box and press "Enter." Double-click "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE," "Software," "Windows," "Microsoft NT," "CurrentVersion," "AeDebug." Right-click the "Debugger" and then click "Delete." You can find the second key by double-clicking "Microsoft" from the tree, then ".NETframework." Locate and delete the "DbgManagedDebugger" key.

References

• MSDN: Just-In-Time Debugging