I wanted to post this in case anyone else came across the same problem.

I have been running into a problem with Visual Studio 2005, Mere Mortals .NET 2.4, SQL Server 2005, and ZoneAlarm Internet Security Suite on a Windows XP system for some time that I finally took time to fix today. If you are running ZoneAlarm Internet Security Suite, or possibly just the ZoneAlarm Anti-Virus product, you may encounter this.

The problem occurred when I tried to run the Mere Mortals .NET Business Layer Generator. When ZoneAlarm was running, the BLG would hang. When I turned off ZoneAlarm, it ran fine. It turns out that ZoneAlarm's Anti-Virus component has a problem with Visual Studio. To fix it, add the Visual Studio executable to the Anti-Virus Exception list in ZoneAlarm. On my system, the VS executable is:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe