How to solve Visual Studio hang problem when working in win7 with Norton antivirus

A recent support email between customer and our developer shows that Norton/Symantec antivirus may affect Visual Studio’s performance in win7 due to the win7 jumplists.  Here’s a workaround for it:

First, to determine if this is the problem, you may want to disable the antivirus temporarily and see if these hangs still repro.

If it’s indeed the case, please create/set the following registry value and restart VS2010.

[HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftVisualStudio10.0General]

“ShowRecentFilesInJumplist”=dword:00000001

With the value set, Visual Studio will not try to remove anymore the files from the Win7 jumplists , which would reduce the chance of an antivirus interfering (at least during file saves)

For the jumplists at least, you may also tell Norton to exclude from monitoring *.automaticDestinations-ms files (these hold the jumplists), or exclude from disk monitoring a folder like C:Users<your_user>AppDataRoamingMicrosoftWindowsRecentAutomaticDestinations

Hope this helps.

Xinyang Qiu

SDET

Web Platform And Tools