Troubles downloading public symbols?

Imagine you are debugging your dump, are already looking forward for the output of the command you just typed (say a kpn to get the stack of a thread) and you get this message instead:

*** ERROR: Symbol file could not be found.  Defaulted to export symbols for mscorwks.dll
WARNING: Frame IP not in any known module. Following frames may be wrong.

As you can understand, not having the symbols for mscorwks in a .NET dump can make your analysis harder and above all without matching symbols you cannot really trust what you see in your debugger (despite the title of my blog! ) and ultimately it can make the dump almost useless. I actually talked with a customer a few days ago whom got this exact situation and he was quite frustrated and upset with Microsoft for not hiving the symbol for the core .NET dll on the public symbol server.

Anyway, without losing his temper that developer used the !sym noisy command to have a look at the symbol loading output, here is what he got:

SYMSRV:  The operation timed out
SYMSRV:  d:\symbols\mscorwks.pdb\62286AFFFC674D5198883B98518936FF2\mscorwks.pdb not found
SYMSRV:  http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols/mscorwks.pdb/62286AFFFC674D5198883B98518936FF2/mscorwks.pdb not found

The pdb was actually on the server, but for some reason we were timing out the operation.

Some researches on the Internet brought to article http://support.microsoft.com/kb/181050

The time-out limit is five minutes for versions 4.0 and 4.01 and is 60 minutes for versions 5.x and 6. Also, the time-out limit is 30 seconds for Windows Internet Explorer 7

A 30 second timeout might not be enough if you are with Internet Explorer 7 on a “slow” connection…

How can this be fixed? Add a ReceiveTimeout DWORD value with a data value of x milliseconds (so number of seconds multiplied 1000) in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings

 

P.s.
Credit for this post must go to Efthimios Dalamagkidis, former CSS Engineer and now CSS customer, thanks for discussing with me!

 

Carlo

Quote of the day:
When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained. - Mark Twain