Two months ago I decided to upgrade to Windows 7 x64 (Beta build 7000) on my XPS M1730.  Although I have had driver related issues I can report that I am completely satisfied with the change.  There are a few little annoyances that I have come across and this one keeps catching me.

When developing any web based application in Visual Studio 2008, be it ASP.NET, MVC, WCF, Web Services or Web Applications. I get the following symptoms and errors when debugging the application

After starting to debug an instance of the browser (IE 8) shows up and freezes then I get an error in the IDE.  “Unable to start program ‘http://localhost:{port}’.” and “Element not found.” as shown below:

When this happens, you will need to do the following in order (don’t ask me why this baffles me)

• You have to click ok to remove the error
• Stop the ASP.NET Development Server
• Kill the iexplorer.exe in Windows Task manager

If you do this and debug your application it works fine and you can debug.   However should make changes to your code and debug it again the symptoms reappear.

Temporary Solution

Run Visual Studio as Administrator and the problem goes away.