Help! My console windows won't go away

Many of you may be seeing an issue where your console windows won't close after you stop debugging. The symptoms of this issue include:

· The console application does not terminate as expected after you stop debugging

· The console windows can be moved, minimized and maximized, but cannot be closed

· The corresponding process does not appear in task manager

· You are unable to properly shut down or restart Windows

We have recently seen this issue impacting many Visual Studio users. The bug that is causing this issue is in csrss, which manages console windows for the Win32 subsystem (among many other things). The bug was introduced by a recent security update to Windows, KB978037.

The Windows team is currently working on a fix for this, and we will post it here as soon as it is ready. Unfortunately, we don’t yet have any timelines that we can share at this time, but we will share any information we can as we get it.

As we would like to like to make sure that Microsoft is able to test this fix as thoroughly as possible, please feel free to share your scenarios below (even if they do not include the use of Visual Studio). Which version of Windows are you using (and what architecture)? Besides stop debugging, can you provide details of other scenarios in which you are running into this same problem?