Some time ago I enabled the alwayson setting for the noexecute switch in boot.ini. Turns out some older programs don’t like it. I had already found out at some point for Borland C++ Builder 6, but this time it was Visual Studio 2003.
Whenever opening the properties of a project I would get an exception (access violation). This was consistently so in Visual Studio 2003 but none of the newer versions exhibited the same behavior. Hence I decided to exclude Visual Studio 2003 (the devenv.exe) from DEP … and it works. Mystery solved.
// Oliver