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visual-studiodebuggingdebug-symbols

Prevent Visual Studio from trying to load symbols for a particular DLL

I have Visual Studio 2005 set up to use Microsoft's symbol servers. I also have UltraMon installed, which injects a hook DLL into every process. Whenever I start debugging my MFC application, Visual Studio says:

"Loading symbols for C:\Program Files\UltraMon\RTSUltraMonHookX32.dll..."

for anything from the blink of an eye to several tens of seconds. It's never going to find those symbols... Can I tell it not to bother looking?

(I tried creating an empty RTSUltraMonHookX32.pdb file, but Visual Studio sees that it's not good and carries on looking.)

Solution

  • You can't do this in a very fine grained fashion but you can disable automatic symbol loading and then manually choose the symbols to load via the Modules window (Debug -> Windows -> Modules).

    To Disable Automatic Symbol loading

    • Tools -> Options -> Debugging -> Symbols
    • Check "Search the above locations only when symbols are loaded manually"