Visual Studio Symbols stored/loaded from wrong place

I'm rather new to symbol servers and I've been experimenting with them and Visual Studio 2008 running Windows XP(SP3). I've encountered a wierd problem as my symbols are not being cached locally in th开发者_StackOverflow中文版e directory I've specified all the time. The possible reasons I have found for this si that the symbols(.pdb's) are being written to VS's IDE directory and/or the symbols are somehow being written in with the .exe, which I find odd since it should be read only. The symbols are being sent to the "server" I've specified so that part of the system shouldn't be the problem.

Has anyone else had this type of issue before and/or maybe a solution to this problem?

Thanks :)

Have you tried explicitly providing a caching directory for symbols?

• Tools -> Options -> Debugger -> Symbols
• Add a symbol cache directory

This will force all symbols loaded from the symbol server locations to be cached in this directory.

I know this is a bit old, but I just encountered the same issue in VS 2010. It turned out to be two problems actually.

1. Premissions issue on the cache symbol directory. This was resolved by going to Tools - Options - Symbols - Empty Symbol Cache, which deletes the directory. When you start debugging the directory should be recreated (immediatelly when message Loading symbols... is shown)

2. Network issue. At some point VS got blocked on firewall and the symbols were actually not loading (but some of them still showed in VS because they were retreived from other directories). I used Fidller Proxy to verify that.

After both of these issues were resolved, caching started to work as expected.