How to deal with an uncooperative debugger

I was working on fixing bugs this afternoon.  I started up i-model composer and then tried to attach the Visual Studio 2008 debugger to iMC process only to be greeted with the following message:

 

Unable to attach to the process.  Check for one of the following.

1. The application you are tyring to debug uses a version fo the Microsoft .NET Framework that is not supported by the debugger.

2. The debugger has made an incorrect assumption about the Microsoft .NET Framework version your application is going to use.

3. The Microsoft .NET Framework version specified by you for debugging is incorrect.

Please see the Visual Studio .NET debugger documentation for correctly specifying the Microsoft .NET Framework version your application is going to use for debugging.

I tried it again and got the same error. I had never run into that before.  I hoped that I hadn't installed something recently that had change my .NET setup. I searched online and found documentation about how to specify the .NET version to use.  It had some steps involving determining the xact version and editing the registry; that was a little too much detail for me considering I had no idea what version it should be using, it just always worked before.

Luckily I re-read the documentation and got some help from the following sentence:  "If the application is already running and you use Attach to, the debugger may not always be able to identify an older version of the .NET Framework".  I tried starting the application through the debugger isntead of trying to attach to it and it worked.  That was much simpler than messing with the registry.