I’ve been trying to figure out why Visual Studio 2008 is running so slowly. With Process Monitor, I noticed a ton of instances of devenv trying to work with or create the file “AtlTraceTool8.exe” (which exists on my system). The problem is, the path it’s using to work with this file looks like a failed resolution of an absolute path, and it causing a ton of repeated failed file operations.
It’s looking for paths like
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\Tools\AtlTraceTool8.exe"
Notice how the path is broken near the middle.
How might I fix this problem? It seems like it might be a Visual Studio configuration error.
Found what’s wrong. This is probably something the developers of Visual Studio need to address, because this is definitely how it came when it was installed.
After installing visual studio, the AtlTraceTool8.exe command menu is incorrectly configured in the registry. You can see this by going to the “Tools” menu bar, and seeing that the option “ATL/MFC Trace Tool” is disabled.
This can be solved by searching for the HKEY_USERS registry key corresponding to these menu items. It will be in a folder structure that looks like
Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\External Tools\The key name is “ToolCMD2”. All the other tool command paths are written out plainly in this set of keys, but for some reason, this one key has the path surrounded by quotation marks. If you edit the key to remove these quotation mars, the tool becomes usable and the silent errors ProcessMon picks up on all go away.