The Microsoft Visual Studio Remote Debugging Monitor has been closed on the remote machine.

I was having an annoying problem with vs2008 where when I tried to debug I would sometimes get this error message:

"Error while trying to run project: Unable to start debugging.

The Microsoft Visual Studio Remote Debugging Monitor has been closed on the remote machine."

But I wasn't remote debugging! It turned out the reason this is happening is because visual studio is a 32 bit application but I'm running a 64 bit OS. When I hit F5 I'm launching a 64 bit application so for visual studio to debug it it has to silently start remote debug to bridge the gap.

The fix: The most reliable way to get around this I've found is to set your startup projects platform to "x86" in the project settings. This removes the need for visual studio to silently do remote debugging.