I managed to make this behavior go away by uninstalling and reinstalling ViEmu.  Now on both machines ESC also exits insert.  I forgot to mention in my previous post, but both machines had the vaxesc option set, so it should have been the same.

Jon, I'm not really sure it's related to installation order. For some reason, Visual Assist sometimes gobbles up keystrokes, and they never get to ViEmu. There is no reason I can understand for the difference in behavior, but there seems to be some race condition or some order dependency. One additional problem is that I haven't been able to reproduce it myself. I hope to be able to address this within the next few days.

I'll get back to you here or by email about it to try to run some instrumented tests.

  - Jon

I have the same issue but with windows xp prof. korean and vs2005.
The issue exist for viemu 2.1.17 and 2.2.5 too.

Actually I have thought hitting esc key twice is normal, even though it's quite annoying,
and didn't know there is an option "vaxesc",
before i read this posting.

The many hours of investigation have finally rendered some results. Awkward results, but some results in any case.

I was able to reproduce the problem in a fresh Vista x86 VM, with VS2005, the latest ViEmu (2.2.6) and the latest Visual Assist (1647). After reproducing the problem, I tried setting up a full ViEmu dev environment, which involves installing VS.NET 2003 and a few additional tools, and the problem went away!

I did this again, and found that, indeed, installing VS.NET 2003 on the same machine seems to fix the issue. It makes it impossible for me to debug the issue, which would be a hard task in any case, but at least it solves it.

So I suggest that you install VS.NET 2003 on the same machine (I only installed Visual C++ support, not any of the other languages), and see whether that fixes the problem. Please let me know whether that works.

This is a tough issue. Event notification seems to work differently sometimes for no good reason, there is no documented dependency that would cause this. And the cause seems to be somewhere deepn in the bowels of Visual Studio, .NET or Windows itself. The fact that installing VS.NET 2003 fixes it leads me to believe there is some kind of dependency on system DLLs or .NET assemblies -- given Windows' fragile design, something in the VS.NET 2003 installation makes VS2005 behave differently, maybe loading another version of some DLL or .NET assembly. You can guess that trying to track the issue with such a subtle dependency is all but impossible. Hopefully the VS.NET 2003 is a viable solution to have it quickly corrected.

By the way, I also tested whether only installing VS.NET 2003's "prerequisites" fixes it, and it turns out it doesn't. You need to actually install VS.NET to fix it (and it's not necessary to even run it once for the magical effect to happen).

Regards,

  - Jon

Jon, please let me know how it works for you. I know that the problem depends on Visual Assist, interacting with all other issues. This bug is "Heisen" even before you run the debugger: just installing it fixes the behavior!

Regards,

  -- Jon

Glad to hear that fixed the issue.! Hopefully it will also work on your work computer.

I'll post back if I find any new info.

Regards,

  - Jon

Hello Pkyoung,

I have tried it and found that if you uninstall VS.NET 2003, unfortunately, the buggy behavior comes back. I will keep experimenting to see whether I can find exactly *what* fixes the behavior (although it's a daunting task). I hope that I can find the exact file or registry entry that fixes the problem.

Meanwhile, the only known solution is to have VS.NET 2003 properly installed.

Regards,

  -- Jon

Thanks so much for sharing this! I think it could be very helpful in other cases where this degenerate behavior happens. Indeed this is a "dark area" of ViEmu <-> VAX interaction, only padded by the fact that it happens in so few installations. It's good to know of at least two work-arounds, given that debugging it seems impossible.

Indeed, ViEmu/VS slowly blends into Visual Studio, and one day it seems like vi/vim editing in VS was there from the beginning. I'm really happy, as that means the tool is doing its job sweetly: the more it disappears in the background, the better it means it is.

Thanks again and best regards,

  -- Jon