When you debug your software on Windows, it’s sometimes useful to also have
access to symbols for Windows DLL. Microsoft is kind enough to provide them
for download and the easiest way to make them available locally is to set
_NT_SYMBOL_PATH environment variable so that it downloads symbol files locally
from Microsoft servers when needed. The right value is
srv*c:\symbols*http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols (you can change
c:\symbols to any directory on your hard-drive).

I was running such setup for some time but observed that starting up a
debugging session too a long time. It was annoying and after a while it hit me
that I’ve caused this: even the simplest Windows program implicitly links a
lot of DLLs. Both Visual Studio and WinDBG feel the need to load up symbols
for all those system DLLs and it turns out it takes a lot of time.

I unset _NT_SYMBOL_PATH and I’m a happier person for it. Most of the time I
don’t need system symbols since the bugs are in my code, but sometimes having
them is useful (e.g. when the crash happens inside Windows). Fortunately you
can still have access them. When needed you can use .sympath to set the path
(e.g. ".sympath srv*c:\symbols*http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols")
and then do .reload to force loading of symbols.