It turns out a few more people read my web log than expected, and it also turns out that I've been writing, lately, when things suck. I guess the fact that I don't write often means things don't suck so badly. But how about a little good--or boring--news, for a change?

I'm sick. I have a cold. That's not good news, and it sucks, but it's not exactly going to cause terrestrial fault lines (it's not earth shattering).

I'm behind in my client work. That also sucks, and I'm making a pretty firm effort this week, committing fifty hours to their projects.

With those out of the way, what's good?

• I have a roof over my head.

• I have friends and family I can depend on, and who are awesome.

• I'm reasonably healthy.

• When I deliver, my clients like my work. And I have the best clients.

• I'm making music with a great bunch of guys.

• I'm writing poetry with a talented bunch of people.

• I'm studying acting with a wonderful bunch of thespians.

• I'm teaching fencing and studying karate with a fellow who is superb in both.

• I have a couple of other projects in the works, about which I will remain mysterious.

I'll try to write each day this week.

It isn't clear to me yet how to solve this problem. I've set Kaspersky's web monitoring to ignore http://localhost. So that should mean that any local activity is ignored. But I still get the hangs. When I disable Kaspersky's web monitoring, the hangs go away.

I'll have to experiment, and send a support email. I can't be the only person to experience this.

No, that's not vernacular. ASP.NET isn't spending time in a relaxed setting with Kaspersky Anti-Virus.

I've been having trouble for a long time with my ASP.NET web pages hanging during load. I could click a button and the page would load fine, click the same button and the page would hang. If I ran in debug mode and set a breakpoint, the page would usually behave fine. If I removed the breakpoint, the page would probably start hanging again. There didn't seem to be a pattern.

Finally, today, I was trying to find a solution when I came across this page.

ASP.NET Hang Case Study: Application hangs on startup

The almost-casual reference to problems with anti-virus programs is what got my attention. I disabled Kaspersky and, ta-da, the problem went away. After some more digging, I cleaned up the Threats and Exclusions Trusted Zone settings. Specifically, I removed everything (there were only four exclusions), then added an application exclusion for Visual Studio 2005 Web Developer Express with two rules: "Do not scan open files", and "Do not scan...network traffic."

I was fooled by an earlier behavior into thinking everything was OK with Kaspersky's settings. When first running VWD in debug mode, it starts its own web browser instance. This causes Kaspersky to generate a warning about an "Invader"...that makes sense to me. I said to add the process to the trusted zone. But it appears that's not enough. As found, above, it's better to explicitly add the program to the trusted zone.

I'm not slamming Kaspersky at all--I think it's a great program. I can't say I understand--except in concept--how Kaspersky is causing the hang to occur. But I'm glad it's stopped.

Or has it? I'll keep you posted.