I encountered an issue in one of my Win 2K8 server machine where debugging a simple application in Visual Studio was taking forever. Everything was fine if you run the application but as soon as you tried debugging it, the performance was really slow and it took forever saying "Loading Symbols..."
When I went to Tool->Options->Debugging->Symbols, I found that it was referring to an environment variable _NT_SYMBOL_PATH whose value was some url which wasn't reachable.
I deleted this environment variable from My Computer->Properties->Advanced System Settings->Advanced->Environment Variables... and everything was fine after that. I was able to debug the application without any issues.
When I went to Tool->Options->Debugging->Symbols, I found that it was referring to an environment variable _NT_SYMBOL_PATH whose value was some url which wasn't reachable.
I deleted this environment variable from My Computer->Properties->Advanced System Settings->Advanced->Environment Variables... and everything was fine after that. I was able to debug the application without any issues.
