ASP.NET Projects Take Forever To Load in Internet Explorer

I recently had a problem that plagued me the last couple of weeks.

Problem: When I pressed F5 or CTRL + F5 or even “View in Browser” from Visual Studio (in an ASP.NET project) Internet Explorer would load. If I had any breakpoints set, the debugger would break, and then I could continue after debugging (or, if I didn’t debug the project would continue to load as normal — in Internet Explorer). Once the project continued to load in Internet Explorer (IE), IE would HANG.

I’m not talking a 5-10 second load. I’m talking 2-3 minutes!! After the initial load, the application would load as expected. I could hit refresh, everything and it would load as expected. Unfortunately this isn’t a feasible solution when I need to debug on a normal basis and I cannot be waiting 2-3 minutes for the debugger to start.

The weird about this is… if I opened IE and went to ANY WEBSITE the site would load instantly. The problem was only with ASP.NET projects, making me thing it had to do with the local cassini web server.

Resolution: After some reading, I came to the conclusion that it could be related to a proxy server. I took a look, NOPE, no proxy server here. So then I started poking around with the system. There were no event logs for anything relating browser or .NET issues. I could not find anything related to this issue, other than a couple people having the SAME exact problem.

On a fluke I decided to hit F5, and then while the enormous load time was taking place I started FireFox. I copied the URL from IE (which looked something like: http://localhost:49696/default.aspx) and then posted it into the address bar of FireFox and hit Enter. To my amazement, the page loaded immediately. But  IE was still hanging, and waiting.

After changing some settings in the Internet Options panel of IE I decided to reset IE’s settings (see below).

After resetting everything, everything started working again. I’m not sure what setting had started this behavior, but I do know that something in my Internet Settings got changed. Over the next week I’m going to attempt to recreate the issue, and if I’m able to, I’ll post the solution here.

But if you’re having this same problem, reset your settings in IE!