Intellisense

Intellisense is not working again...

I know, I know, "disable it". But I like the feature! When it works,
that is...

I had it working for me for a few months, and no idea what made it work
after I had had trouble with it for years. No serious updates, the same
old VS2008 with SP... Same old 'feacp.dll', AFAICT.

Anyway, yesterday it stopped working. Just gets stuck on some file,
1436 files from the end. I have no idea why. I have no idea what file
it is (or I could have edited it some to try to push IS over the hump).
  What is worse is if I try right-clicking, it hangs, because it tries
using the same hanging thread, I guess, when enabling/disabling "Go to
definition" or "Go to declaration" entries on the local menu. So, once
IS hangs, do not use the local menu, or the whole IDE hangs. Oh, and
you can't close the IDE, because the IS thread is hanging (going in an
infinite loop? one of my CPUs is used up by it). So, you have to kill
IDE and lose your layout, your breakpoints, etc. I hate that.

Anyway, today I decided to look where this POS (S is for 'Software')
hangs, so I fired up another VS2008 and attached to the first one, with
the hanging Intellisense. So, lo and behold, one of the threads has
this call stack:

 > feacp.dll!5bbd7a38()
   [Frames below may be incorrect and/or missing, no symbols loaded
for feacp.dll]
   feacp.dll!5bbd8809()
   feacp.dll!5bbd7bdf()
   feacp.dll!5bbd9d56()
   feacp.dll!5bbdf07d()
   feacp.dll!5bc852c6()
   feacp.dll!5bbdfbbd()
   feacp.dll!5bb94907()
   feacp.dll!5bbd8809() - recursive? (see 6 calls up)
   feacp.dll!5bbd7bdf() - recursive?
   feacp.dll!5bbd9d56() - recursive?
   feacp.dll!5bbdf210()
   feacp.dll!5bba5e22()
   feacp.dll!5bb41be4()
   feacp.dll!5bba7150()
   feacp.dll!5bca1959()
   ntdll.dll!_ZwAllocateVirtualMemory@24() + 0xc bytes
   kernel32.dll!7792b85b()
 > msvcr90.dll!_stricmp(const char * dst=0x00000007, const char *
src=0xfffffffe) Line 105 + 0xc bytes C++

(yes, it's hanging in 'stricmp', in 'stricmp.c', line 105 - I have the
sources for the C run-time, and so do you if you have 'Pro' or above, I
believe).

Why '_ZwAllocateVirtualMemory@24' calls into 'feacp.dll', I have no
idea. Of course, I might have an idea if I had the debug symbols for
'feacp.dll'... Or the source. <wink-wink>

I know MS has redone IS in VS2010. It's now all fine and dandy, no
problems whatsoever, I am sure. But we're not going to switch for at
least two more years - company policy. So, we're going to suffer with
or without IS *unless* MS decides to open up and give us some
information on the sometimes-not-working Intellisense 2008. How hard
can that be?

Take this as an open letter to Microsoft Visual Studio Dev team. Come
on, folks, you know you want it fixed, give us a chance! I don't have
much time to spend on it, but maybe, just maybe, I can find that elusive
problem (thread lock? an infinite loop?), and you can fix it for
good... How many people is it going to make happier? By my estimates,
many.

V
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