Debugged Program Window Won't Close

Question

I'm using VS 2008 on a 64-bit XP machine. I'm debugging a 32-bit C++ DLL via a console program. The DLL and EXE projects are contained in the same SLN so that I can modify the DLL as I test.

What happens is that every once in a while I kill the program with Debug | Stop Debugging (Shift-F5). VS stops the program, but the console window stays open! If I'm sitting at a breakpoint and hit Shift-F5, it will terminate properly, but if the program is running full-tilt when I stop it, I often see this instead.

The big problem is that I can't close these zombie windows. Using End Task in Task Manager does nothing (no message, no nothing). When I shut down the machine, it is unable to due to the orphans and I have to resort to actually turning off the power.

I think this is connected to having the DLL and EXE project in the same SLN, as for months I worked on this project in 2 VS instances, one for the DLL and the other for the EXE. I would continually jump back and forth between the windows as I worked. This problem never happened until I put the two projects into a single SLN. The single SLN works a lot better, but this anomaly is very irritating.

Any ideas anyone?

UPDATE

After a bit of searching (here), I found that it appears to have to do with one of the updates from last Tuesday (KB977165 or KB978037). Thank you Microsoft for your excellent pre-release testing.

Answer 1

I've definitely seen oddities with handles not being released and task manager not working right. I've found that Process Explorer does a good job and figuring out what's going on with orphaned windows, file locks, and generally odd behavior that happens.