Visual Studio Yellow Tooltip stuck on screen

Question

I'm running VS2013 Professional on Windows 7 x64 and often finding that, after a debug session, the yellow tooltips from the debugger don't go away and stay on the screen on top of other windows. For example, the image attached shows a debug tooltip now also showing on top of me posting this question.

I am able to hide it temporarily by pressing Win + d to show the desktop, but as soon as I open / navigate to any window, the tooltip is right back.

The only way I've been able to get rid of these tooltips has been to close and re-open my Visual Studio. Any thoughts about what else I could do?

Answer 1

Try sending the WM_CLOSE message to the tooltip window.

I had hoped to be able to do that with Spy++, but alas you can't send messages from that.

I downloaded SendMessage from StephansTools, this then lets me use the cross hair to select the offending tooltip window and then send the WM_CLOSE message to it.

Caveat: This only seems to work in some circumstances. It's worth a try but may not work every time.

Answer 2

On your screenshot, the tooltip is "this is the next statement that will be executed". This tooltip appears when you hover over a yellow arrow to the left of the code while stepping in debugger (there must be no breakpoint on the current line).

It's quite likely that when the tooltip is stuck, you can un-stuck it by howering over that yellow arrow again, then moving mouse cursor away from it.

As for permanent solution to the problem, I would blame third-party applications that install hooks. Try to temporarily disable whatever such software you have and see if it helps. If you can't figure the exact repro to get the problem, you can simply close any other software you can and do your debugging for a while.

Some typical examples of hooking software:

1. Input assistance (voice to text, ...)
2. Automatic keyboard layout correction
3. Dictionary and language translation
4. Anything that creates new buttons in other programs
5. Screenshot software