Extreme slowness in Visual Studio 2010's Exceptions Dialog - how to prevent?

Question

Recently Visual Studio's Exception Dialog load-up is more infuriatingly slow than usual - taking as much as 1 minute (!) to show up.

Are there any tried-and-true methods to fix this?

I've already tried unchecking "Microsoft Symbol Server" checkbox under Options/Debugging, and changing the symbols directory to an empty folder, but that didn't help.

Answer 1

It's never been a particularly quick dialog, there's a ton of info buried in it, but a minute is outrageous. The symbol server settings does not affect this dialog, that can't be it. Do watch out for using the Add option, maybe used in a previous project with an exception type that was defined in an assembly that's not there anymore. Maybe on a network share, long delays like that are almost always network timeouts.

Get better insight in what's cranking away during this minute with SysInterals' ProcMon utility.