How Do You Solve the Invalid Pointer Issue in Visu

Question

Ok, on the edge of frustration here... and I am having the worst time of my life. For the life of me, I cannot solve this issue with my Visual Studio 2013 installation. No matter what I've tried, it continues to throw up "Invalid Pointer" every time I attempt to preview my solution in a browser.

Before I had other issues, but I uninstalled and re-installed. Updated, rebuild solution/project, set the browser to bypass the proxy for localhost, loaded the latest version of IIS and Asp.Net... you name it. And it just continues to greet me with the following:

It's not telling me anything else. I did have VS 2012 and VS 2010 on this machine, but I uninstalled them. Now I'm left with this. What is the deal with this occurring? Can anyone provide some insight? I have two hard drives on this machine. If this doesn't work, I'll try to install it on the other side and hope it works well with SQL Server, because SQL is on my C drive. I have a dual boot and will just boot into the other Windows 8.1 Pro side and try that. Figured I find a solution here first and learn a thing or two before resorting to that. Thanks!

Answer 1

Sorry mate. I have the same issue. I have some good news for you though. I got this by pressing F5 to run my solution. If I press Ctrl-F5 to run it, it does not give me this error. It is not in debug mode, so your app will just crash if something goes wrong. You can however run your app.

Answer 2

I think this problem is caused by importing VS2010 settings. Anyway, this solved the problem for me:

1. Go to \Users\<Username>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\VisualStudio\12.0
2. Rename the folder to '_12.0'
3. Repeat for \Users\<Username>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\VisualStudio\12.0
4. Open Registry Editor
5. Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\12.0
6. Rename the key to _12.0

Answer 3

I had the same problem. I had updated visual studio (update 4) but my connection failed during the update so I didn't update visual studio completely. And the error "Invalid Pointer" occurred each time I was debugging my program, Until I update it once more but this time completely. So no more error.

I suggest you to update your visual studio and here's where you should update it : http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=44921

Answer 4

This is how I solved it (it may not exactly be your problem but worth giving a try in case nothing else works)

• try running Visual Studio as Admin if it works fine else try the next step
• Open "secpol.msc"
• go to Local Policies -> User Rights Assignments -> Debug Programs
• Add your login account to Debug Programs

It should work after adding Debug priviliges to your account.