Fixing broken Visual Studio’s project publishing mechanism

…  and unexpected repair the debugger.

For quite time I had problems with IE on my laptop (I have various others problems too, as effects of my manipulation with the file system and playing with registry. Reinstalling system is no option for me). IE didn’t start, it flashed white for a second and was closed. Additionally I cannot use ActiveX components. The fix that done the trick was reregister ieproxy.dll. Now IE is running properly but not ActiveX components.

But I had other problems with debugger in Visual Studio. Each time I started debugging project I saw that message:

“Attaching the  ProteusDebugEngine debugger to process ‘[xxx] MyProject.vshost.exe’ on machine ‘MyMachine’ failed. Invalid pointer”

That was really annoying and I couldn’t find how to fix it.

The other problem was that I couldn’t publish my app through VS. VS always throw at me exception below:

“Unable to cast COM object of type ‘System.__ComObject’ to interface type ‘Microsoft.VisualStudio.OLE.Interop.IServiceProvider’. This operation failed because the QueryInterface call on the COM component for the interface with IID ‘{6D5140C1-7436-11CE-8034-00AA006009FA}’ failed due to the following error: No such interface supported (Exception from HRESULT: 0×80004002 (E_NOINTERFACE)). (Microsoft.VisualStudio.OLE.Interop).

After some search and fully reading this post and the comments I had done the following steps:

1. Used script from page above that reregistered ieproxy and actxprxy [with no effect]
2. Executed from the command prompt:
   >> sfc /scannow [with no effect after reboot]
3. Used FixIt app, with option that fixed desktop features & opening desktop files [fixed some errors but with no effect after reboot]
4. Reregistered again the files from  1. in another way:
   >> regsvr32 %SystemRoot%\System32\actxprxy.dll
   >> regsvr32 %ProgramFiles%\Internet Explorer\ieproxy.dll

Finally something has happened. The path in %ProgramFiles% was right but I coludn’t reregister ieproxy file.

1.  Renamed both IE folders (x86 and x64) as ‘Internet Explorer0’ and executed:
   >> sfc /scannow [with no effect after reboot]
2. Reregistered ieproxy:
   >> regsvr32 %ProgramFiles%\Internet Explorer\ieproxy.dll

And that was it! After reboot I could publish my project and when I tried debugging project the debugger had no complaint to me.  I take the thing with fixing debugger as side effect of my previous action, but I don’t know which exactly.

Now time to fix the bug with ActiveX component.