I am posting this in case anyone out there is having similar problems and needs ideas for a solution.
After very happily using Pelles C for quite a while, I recently had problems with the debugger hanging up. When I would hit "debug", the IDE would freeze after launching a window titled idespawn.exe. The idespawn.exe window would not close normally; instead a Windows prompt would appear, and I would need to select "end now" to kill idespawn.exe. But then tall the project menu options would be greyed out, so I would be unable to stop the debugger and get back to working with the IDE. The only way to get the IDE back to normal was to close it entirely and re-start it. I tried re-installing Pelles C, or installing different versions, all without success.
On this forum, I found a post from Matthellyer, who had a similar problem and traced it to a conflict with his antivirus software. I had been running Avira, and replaced it with Symantec Antivirus, but without success.
Finally, yesterday I completely purged the last remnants of Avira and Symantec Antivirus from my system (including using the Norton antivirus removal tool) and replaced them with the new (and free) Microsoft Security Essentials antivirus utility. Not only does MSE seem to work well (surprisingly well, for a Microsoft product), but best of all, Pelles C is now back to its old, friendly self!
I can't say enough good things about Pelle's C. Clean, compact, efficient, easy to use -- and free of the distracting doo-dads that afflict most software these days. It's a godsend for those of us who still write C and don't want to hassle with a bloated C++ development environment. Thanks, Pelle!
