title: Why are my local dlls taking forever to load after setting _NT_SYMBOL_PATH?
body: <p>I've setup _NT_SYMBOL_PATH and have pointed it to </p>
  
  <pre><code>srv*c:\symbols*http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>When starting the debugger, I notice that the Windows related dlls load quickly. However, our company's dlls are taking a god awful long time to load. When I get rid of _NT_SYMBOL_PATH, restart visual studio, then everything loads pretty quickly (albeit I don't have MS symbols).</p>
  
  <p>It's almost as if the symbol server above is being searched for my internal company dll's pdbs instead of first checking to see if they exist locally. Some of these dlls I do not have pdbs for. Some are part of my solution, so I build them when debugging and always have pdbs.</p>
  
  <p>How is Visual Studio searching for symbols? Is there anyway I can control how visual studio searches for symbols? Can I explicitly say that for dlls from a given directory are not to be searched for symbols? Is there anything else that might drag down how fast symbols are loaded or anything I can do to speed up the process?</p>