Question

Has anyone gotten a debugger attached to mshta.exe after installing IE9? (64bit or WOW64)

Answer 1

I’m on a Vista x64, so I have to contend with the 32bit/64bit barrier.

HTA

• c:\windows\system32\mshta.exe
  (mshta32)
• c:\windows\syswow64\mshta.exe
  (mshta64)

Launching

• “mshta32 foo.hta” may use mshta32 or mshta64 depending on what is associated with HTA
• the same goes if “mshta64 foo.hta” is used
• “cmd /C start foo.hta” would have the same affect.

Debugger

• MS Script Editor (from Office XP/2003) for JS debugging in IE/HTA

Normally I would use the debugger keyword to initiate the launching of the debugger, however with IE9, it doesn’t seem to do that anymore. I must launch the debugger first, attach to the mshta.exe process manually (only supports 32bit). Then everything appears to work fine!

EDIT:

With coworkers, different machine have exhibited different behaviors:

• debugger keyword works fine
• Connecting to MSHTA.EXE from the debugger doesn’t work

I haven’t yet found a silver bullet.