title: Why is Microsoft.PythonTools.Attacher.exe blocking Visual Studio 2010?
body: <p>At least two or three times a day Visual Studio gets stuck (in a deadlock I suspect) and displays the spinning-toilet-bowl-of-death cursor and pops up the dreaded "<em>Microsoft Visual Studio is Busy</em>" notification in the notification area:</p>
  
  <p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/hKuzJ.png" alt="enter image description here"></p>
  
  <p>It used to be that when this happened Visual Studio would stay like that for hours (and possibly until the end of time itself or a power cut) unless I kicked it to the kerb with an "End Process" in task manager. </p>
  
  <p>More recently I noticed another process always seemed to be lurking about whenever this problem arises - <a href="http://pytools.codeplex.com/SourceControl/changeset/view/fd5dab3d30f4#Release/Product/Python/Attacher/Attacher.csproj" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><code>Microsoft.PythonTools.Attacher.exe</code></a> - which is part of the <a href="http://pytools.codeplex.com/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Python Tools for Visual Studio project</a>:</p>
  
  <p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/Z0EjD.png" alt="enter image description here"></p>
  
  <p>If I kill that process then Visual Studio manages to free itself from whatever deadly embrace it's got itself into and can continue on its way, and this is what I look out for every time VS does this.</p>
  
  <p>Whilst I do have Python Tools for Visual Studio 1.0 installed, the projects I am working on are plain old ASP.NET MVC3 apps written in C#. I'm not using any Python code or libraries and often I only have one instance of Visual Studio running.</p>
  
  <p>What I also observe is that this process doesn't always start/appear for whole development sessions, and when it does, it seems to start up an random times (i.e. it's not there for the first hour or two and then it magically appears in the process list in task manager), but when it does I know I'm going be in trouble at some point.</p>
  
  <p>Does anyone know why this process seems to randomly start and why it's interfering with Visual Studio in such a dramatic fashion?</p>
  
  <p>I'm running Visual Studio 2010 Premium SP1 on Windows 7 Ultimate x64 SP1.</p>