If symbols will not download no matter what you do, the problem may be that Internet Explorer has been set to the Work Offline mode. You will not receive any warnings of this in Windbg, Visual C++ or Visual Studio. Even using the command line with symchk.exe to download symbols will fail. This is because Microsoft uses Internet Explorer's internet & proxy settings to download the symbol files. Check the File menu of Internet Explorer to ensure "Work Offline" is unchecked.