Unable to connect to the Microsoft Visual Studio Remote Debugging Monitor

CoreyRoth — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 15:22:00 GMT

This error has been pissing me off for a long time. I have an environment that works great for remote debugging most of the time. However, every couple of days when I show up for work, I encounter the following error.

Unable to connect to the Microsoft Visual Studio Remote Debugging Monitor named 'DOMAIN\USER@MACHINENAME'. The Visual Studio Remote Debugger on the target computer cannot connect back to this computer. Authentication failed. Please see Help for assistance.

If you do a Google search, you will find that this is because the remote computer cannot connect back to the desktop for some reason. By the error it's obviously an authentication issue. Most articles point to making sure that the account the remote debugger is on also has access to the client machine. I am using the same account which is local administrator on both, so that is not the issue.

So how do I resolve this issue when it occurs? Reboot the client machine. It's annoying but it does fix the problem. I have tried restarting Visual Studio and other things and that simply does not work. The only thing that works for me is rebooting. Also note that this occurs for me in both Visual Studio 2005 and 2008

Corey Roth [MVP] : Error, Remote Debugging, Visual Studio 2008

Unable to connect to the Microsoft Visual Studio Remote Debugging Monitor