Since some days ago, I was getting the following error when closing Visual Basic 6.0 from the Visual Studio debugger (I am developing a .NET-based version of MZ-Tools for the 64-bit VBA editor of Office, and VB6 will get it too):

LoaderLock was detected
Message: Attempting managed execution inside OS Loader lock. Do not attempt to run managed code inside a DllMain or image initialization function since doing so can cause the application to hang.

This is a warning of the Managed Debugging Assistants (MDA) of Visual Studio.

Today I decided to investigate. Soon it was clear that it was caused by the test-runner add-in that I created to run integration tests within VB 6.0. Since the error was caused during shutdown, I removed initializations (and the corresponding cleanups) to isolate the problem and I discovered that the problem was in this method:

internal List<string> GetAddinProgIds()
{
   List<string> colAddinProgIds;

   colAddinProgIds = new List<string>();

   foreach (AddIn objAddIn in m_objVBE.Addins)
   {
      colAddinProgIds.Add(objAddIn.ProgId);
   }
   return colAddinProgIds;
}

That method gets the registered add-ins of the VBE object (to load them in a combobox and select an add-in to run its test suites).

I soon realized that maybe I should release properly some COM object and certainly the problem was fixed:

internal List<string> GetAddinProgIds()
{
   List<string> colAddinProgIds;
   Addins colAddins;

   colAddinProgIds = new List<string>();

   colAddins = m_objVBE.Addins;
   foreach (AddIn objAddIn in colAddins)
   {
      colAddinProgIds.Add(objAddIn.ProgId);
   }

   // The following statement is to prevent the following error:
   // LoaderLock was detected
   // Message: Attempting managed execution inside OS Loader lock. Do not attempt to run managed code inside a DllMain
   // or image initialization function since doing so can cause the application to hang.
   System.Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal.ReleaseComObject(colAddins);

   colAddins = null;

   return colAddinProgIds;
}