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

debug-symbolsdebuggingvisual studio

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.)

Best Answer

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"