Visual Studio Development Server using wrong port

Question

Related to a previous issue that I thought was resolved and actually isn't...

My Visual Studio 2008 installation may be a bit messed up, I think.

1. When my ASP.NET project is set up to use VS Dev Server with a fixed port, I get the "Port in use" error described in the linked question.
2. When my project is set up to use a random (auto-assigned) port number, it works, but it launches the browser using a port number 3 less than the actual Dev Server port number (e.g. if the port number is 1903, the browser launches to http://localhost:1900/)
3. If I make changes to the project settings, they do not "take" until I save and restart Visual Studio.

Any ideas how to track this one down?

Thanks!

Answer 1

I had a similar problem which hit my 2 main machines at the same time. On investigating I found it to be related to the Eset personal security (guessing a recent update messed something up). To solve it I excluded VS2008 from the active browser filtering - this is in: setup -> advanced firewall setup -> antivirus & anti spyware -> web access protection -> HTTP -> webbrowsers

Deselecting vsdev in here fixed the problem - interestingly enough disabling the firewall and antivirus / antispyware did not solve the issue, so it is worth looking for a similar setting if you are running different security software