It's hard to miss the irony in the fact that the Visual Studio debuggers are riddled with bugs. As one of the most widely-used programming tools I'd expect it to be polished beyond reproach, however even in the managed world the debugger is - to put it mildly - not perfect.

The VS2003/.NET 1.1 debugger is particularly susceptible to threading issues. It stalls, it barfs, it lies, and now it even triggers exceptions in your code that aren't even documented in MSDN - I was getting ThreadStopExceptions on some of my threads while stepping over instructions. There was no way to know when it might happen and no way to reproduce it consistently. I was reluctant to blame the debugger at first, but this thread provided both the culprit and the solution: close all locals, autos and watch windows and you should be right as rain.