NET9 and NET10 applications can crash with a 0x80000003 exception on startup

[auott]

Description

This was originally filed as a VS Feedback ticket here: https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/t/Intermittent-crash-on-application-startu/11017289

Reproduction Steps

F5 or Ctrl+F5 a NET9 or NET10 application with Hot Reload enabled.

Expected behavior

Application runs.

Actual behavior

Application sometimes crashes with an exception (0x80000003) being thrown.

Regression?

No response

Known Workarounds

Disable hot reload.

Configuration

No response

Other information

No response

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[tommcdon]

Posted a comment on the VS feedback item requesting more information.

Sergio Cascales Puerto please work with us on #122903 moving forward for this issue. I was not able to reproduce the issue and so for us to make forward progress, would need more information. Would it be possible to provide a small, reproducible test case that demonstrates the problem (along with step by step instructions on how to trigger the crash)? Also it was mentioned that the issue reproduces outside of the debugger with Control-F5 and Hot Reload enabled. Does the issue occur when using dotnet watch? If yes, are any edits performed and applied that results in the crash or simply starting the app causes the issue?

[dotnet-policy-service]

This issue has been marked needs-author-action and may be missing some important information.

[scascalespAV]

Hello

Several people on my team are experiencing this issue, while others are not, using the same project, the same Visual Studio version, and the same Windows version. This makes the problem particularly difficult to diagnose and reproduce reliably.

The most problematic aspect is that when the error occurs, Visual Studio/runtime closes or fails without providing any meaningful error message or detailed diagnostic information. There is no stack trace, no clear exception, and no actionable log output that would help us understand the root cause.

From a developer experience standpoint, it would be significantly better if, when this failure occurs, the runtime or tooling:

surfaced a detailed error message,

logged the underlying exception and stack trace, or

provided guidance on what component or condition triggered the failure.

Even if the issue is environment-specific or related to subtle machine differences, having explicit diagnostics instead of a silent shutdown would make troubleshooting far more feasible.

Thanks

[tommcdon]

Hi @scascalespAV! We are sorry to hear about the issue. Few questions to help us narrow down potential root causes and options for next steps:

1. Does the issue reproduce for a helloworld app or in a reduced app (with minimal dependencies)?
2. Does the issue reliably reproduce on VS 2022 and VS 2026?
3. Does it also reproduce on .NET 8?
4. Does the issue reproduce with dotnet watch?
5. How quickly does the app crash - immediately at startup, after hot reload edits have been performed?

Visual Studio/runtime closes or fails without providing any meaningful error message or detailed diagnostic information.

Does this mean that VS crashes in addition to the target app?

logged the underlying exception and stack trace, or

For console apps, it is expected that unhandled managed exceptions should be written to the console, unless there is a native crash (such as an internal issue in the runtime) or an external process terminating the app that prevents this from occurring.

having explicit diagnostics instead of a silent shutdown would make troubleshooting far more feasible.

The lack of diagnostics is unexpected. We will suggest next steps after we have collected enough information on what the nature of the issue is and evaluated available options. Note this might require using an instrumented runtime build that collects extra diagnostics.

[scascalespAV]

Hello

It will take me a long time to diagnose everything requested. It happens as soon as the app starts. I think it would be easier to provide details of the error, not just the code, to give us some clues.
Thx