I have recently made the switch to VS 2013 and have ported my code to use it and the pre-built Qt 5.4 distros for VS 2013

I find that debugging has come to a complete standstill. Code that runs in a second or two in release mode can take an hour or more to run in debug mode even with no breakpoints set. After extensive googling, following suggestions, and getting no improvement, I came across the suggestion that because the evil Redmond company (thanks, RolandHughes) pushed run-time bounds checking down into the STL by default, this has resulted in orders of magnitude slowdowns in code that heavily uses STL and STL iterators (which mine does).

There is a way to disable this, by rebuilding your code with the macro _ITERATOR_DEBUG_LEVEL set to 0. I did this for the dozens of projects used to build my code. Now at the last step, I find that my Qt distros were built using the default value for this macro, which is incompatible and will not link with code built using a different setting. I don't want to go down the rat hole of rebuilding my Qt distributions from source, because it takes hours and hours and I can't assure myself that what I get is the same as what I get in a prebuilt distro.

Has anyone else using Visual Studio 2010 or later seen these problems in debugging?

Does Qt Creator use the evil Redmond debugger for code built using the evil Redmond tool chain?

Any solutions, advice, anecdotes, incantations, spells, or exorcisms would be greatly welcome at this point.