A while back I posted this query which was asking how to make Visual Studio's ability to automatically download debug symbols from Microsoft's debug sysbol server permanent (eg not on a per-solution file basis). Well today I came across KB311503 which show how to do this. You can set the environment variable _NT_SYMBOL_PATH to make this work system-wide. I set mine to: _NT_SYMBOL_PATH=symsrv*symsrv.dll*c:\debug_symbols*http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols I did have to download the lastest version of the “Debugging Tools” from the DDK site and replace Visual Studio’s version of symsrv.dll with the one from the lastest debugging tools to get it to work.