Recently I was forced to do full time development on my MacBook because I killed my Windows Laptop (btw, turns out it is a bad idea to spill milk on the keyboard of a laptop… who knew).  When doing this I was running Windows7 under VM via Fusion.  Everything was working great……until I fired up NHProf.

The second I fired up NHProf my VM basically stopped working.  To say the least Ii was a bit perplexed.  To confirm it was NHProf and not something else, I killed the app to see if everything would go back to normal.. sure enough it did.

At this point I was pretty sure NHProf was the culprit.  In order to figure out the issue or if this was an isolated issue I asked the twitterverse and of course my good buddy Rob Eisenberg (who happens to be one of the authors of the GUI) asked me to try something.

He asked me to turn off hardware acceleration on the gfx card and try it again.  I did as he asked and…. bam, the problem went away.  Rob is not 100% sure what the cause is, but he is currently having a conversation with the WPF team to see if there is a known issue with this and will report back his findings and I will do so as well.

So, long story short.  If running under VM and NHProf is dogging make sure you have hardware acceleration turn off and that should resolve your issue.

Till next time.