Not so long ago I was confronted with a very bizarre problem… I was using visual studio 2010 and whenever I opened up the Test Impact view I would suddenly see my pc perf go down drastically…  Investigating this problem, I found out that hundreds of “Intellitrace.exe” processes had been started on my system and I could not close them as they would re-start as soon as I would close one.  That was very weird.  So I knew it had something to do with the Test Impact but how can this feature and Intellitrace.exe going crazy be related?  After a bit of thinking I remembered that a teammate (Etienne Tremblay, ALM MVP) had told me once that he had seen this issue before just after installing a MOCKING FRAMEWORK that uses the .NET Profiler API…  Apparently there’s a conflict between the test impact features of Visual Studio and some mocking products using the .NET profiler API…  Maybe because VS 2010 also uses this feature for Test Impact purposes, I don’t know…

Anyways, here’s the fix…  Go to your VS 2010 and click the “Test” menu.  Then go to the “Edit Test Settings” and choose EACH test setting file applying the following actions (normally 2 files being “Local” and TraceAndTestImpact”:

-          Select the Data And Diagnostic option on the left

-          Make sure that the ASP.NET Client Proxy for Intellitrace and Test Impact option is NOT SELECTED

-          Make sure that the Test Impact option is NOT SELECTED

-          Save and close

Edit Test Settings

Problem solved…  For me having to choose between the “Test Impact” features and the “Mocking Framework” was a no brainer, bye bye test impact…  I did not investigate much on this subject but I feel there might be a way to have them both working by enabling one after the other in a precise sequence…  Feel free to leave a comment if you know how to make them both work at the same time!

Hope this helps someone out there !