I use the debug runtime in the IDE religiously and rarely look at the console window when trying out new features. There are some cases I break out and main() does not return (or something), so I obtain console windows under my project name that are impossible to close. I cannot even terminate the process from the GUI, as there is no process entry. I notice I can not shut down or restart the computer if I get one of these windows. I don't need to describe how annoying this is, so I would greatly appreciate any details on how to remove these things so I can get back to a normal session. Any information on how (and if?) I screwed up will be helpful as well. [Edited by - zyrolasting on February 14, 2010 12:35:01 AM]

What are the exact steps you need to do in order to trigger this problem? Do you have a small code sample that consistently triggers it?

I'm trying to develop a virtual machine, and I just found a bug that provokes undefined behavior. I was pushing pointer values onto a stack and was erroneously grabbing addresses to them [the pointers] and trying to pass them off as l-values.
In short, my code thought that a T* was a T&, and happily went about it's way. Got that fixed, thank God.

I don't know if that was the source of the command line issue, as that seemed to happen randomly. I'm trying to provoke another purgatory window, but I'm not getting one yet. I'll post again if I have more info.

FYI, just to let you know you're not alone, I had an app in which I could do that on occasion. Mine was a windowed DirectX app - the window would close (not appearing on the desktop anyway) but the process still showed up in Task Manager. Neither taskmanager nor Process Explorer would kill it. Had to do a hard power-down to get out of the situation.

I did something to fix the app but don't know what.

Two possible symptoms:

1. At least once, I was debugging on a breakpoint and, without thinking, edited and attempted to rebuild. I got the "Do you want to stop debugging?" messagebox, answered "Yes," but to no avail.

2. Also, at the time it would happen on occasion, I had some memory leaks which I was trying to trace. I found the leaks, fixed them and that behavior has not recurred.

Reviving topic.

The bug I fixed solved my first instance of the problem, but I later misused strcmp by passing it a null pointer. This gave me a runtime error, and stopping the application did not get rid of the command line window. Again, I can't get rid of it, and again, I cannot shut down or restart with it up. I need to find a way to terminate the process even though no process entry for the app exists.

God, this sucks.