Vista and Managed Performance Counters
While doing some work on RuleManager I was having trouble running integration tests on my development system which is 64bit "Business" Vista. I would invoke the test using TestDriven.Net and sometimes the test would run fine and sometimes it would just sit and spin. Additionally through out the day I was getting this dialog.
My first attempts to Google it didn't return anything obvious so I kept going. Later during the day my entire network stack shutdown. I was worried that my Vista install was destabilizing and did a reboot and made sure all my drivers were up-to-date.
Trying to finish up my task today I once again got the WMI Performance Reverse Adapter stopped message so googled it once again and this time came upon this post which pointed me at Managed Performance Counters as a possible culprit. The product I am working on, RuleManager, is using our fcSDK under the hood which does have managed performance counters. Handily we do have a switch to disable initialization of the performance counters.
<appSettings>
<add key="fchoice.perfcountersenabled" value="false"/>
...
</appSettings>
After disabling the performance counters my integration tests are now returning consistently. Manna from heaven. I have another reason to hate Vista for its crappy support of Managed Performance Counters, well at least for .Net 1.1 applications. I also can at least start making head way developing fcSDK based applications on Vista.
