I have a .NET 3.5 desktop application that had been showing periodic slow downs in functionality whenever the test machine it was on was out of the office. I managed to replicate the error on a machine in the office without an internet connection, but it was only when i used ANTS performance profiler that i got a clearer picture of what was going on.

In ANTS I saw a "Waiting for synchronization" taking up to 16 seconds that corresponded to the delay I could see in the application when NHibernate tried to load the System.Data.SqlServerCE.dll assembly. If I tried the action again immediately it would work with no delay but if I left it for 5 minutes then it would be slow to load again the next time I tried it.

From my research so far it appears to be because the SqlServerCE dll is signed and so the system is trying to connect to get the certificate revocation lists and timing out. Disabling the "Automatically detect settings" setting in the Internet Options LAN settings makes the problem go away, as does disabling the "Check for publishers certificate revocation". But the admins where this application will be deployed are not going to be happy with the idea of disabling certificate checking on a per machine or per user basis so I really need to get the application level disabling of the CRL check working.

There is the well documented bug in .net 2.0 which describes this behaviour, and offers a possible fix with a config file element.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<configuration>
    <runtime>
        <generatePublisherEvidence enabled="false"/>
    </runtime>
</configuration>

This is NOT working for me however even though I am using .net 3.5. The SQLServerCE dll is being loaded dynamically by NHibernate and I wonder if the fact that it's dynamic could somehow be why the setting isn't working, but I don't know how I could check that.

Can anyone offer suggestions as to why the config setting might not work? Or is there another way I could disable the check at the application level, perhaps a CAS policy setting that I can use to set an exception for the application when it's installed? Or is there something I can change in the application to up the trust level or something like that?

I have also tried using to no advantage

ServicePointManager.CheckCertificateRevocationList = false;

http://rusanu.com/2009/07/24/fix-slow-application-startup-due-to-code-sign-validation/

I have also tried those registry settings out and unfortunately they didn't help. The dlls that appear to be the cause of the hold up are native SQL Server CE dlls, and looking at the stack traces in ProcMon mscorwks.dll doesn't appear to be involved even though the checks on crypto and cert registry keys are being done under the .NET application. It's definitely still something to do with publisher certificate checking because unticking "Check for publisher revocation certificate" still works but something odd is going on.