For a while, I've had the problem where my .NET performance counters have been missing from my system. This had the side effect of breaking Process Explorer's ability to highlight which processes are .NET processes. Process Explorer checks for the presence of the performance counters to see whether .NET is installed, and if it doesn't find them it disables its .NET process detection.

Apparently a lot of people encounter this problem, since point 31 and 32 on the Process Explorer FAQ try to address it. However, the solutions they provide have never worked for me. However, recently I figured out what was stuffing it up. If you're in the same position as me and the FAQ doesn't help you, you might want to check this out. I run Vista x64, so if you're running XP still I can't guarantee this will work for you, since I haven't looked at it on XP.

Browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\.NETFramework\Performance in regedit. Have a look at the "Library" value. Does it say "donotload_mscoree.dll"? If so, that's your problem. Change it to mscoree.dll and you're set. Apparently, MSDN says this about why it's not loaded:

If the .NET Framework is installed on a system that is running Windows XP, any process that uses the Performance Data Helper (PDH) functions to retrieve performance counters may stop responding ("hang") for 60 seconds when the process exits.
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This delay is caused by a bug in the .NET Framework performance extension DLL, Mscoree.dll.

Hence, they recommend disabling the counters by renaming the library to donotload_mscoree.dll. That's an awesome solution, Microsoft! Why not just fix your bugs?! Luckily, they say it only applies to .NET 1.0 and 1.1, which are so old and irrelevent I wouldn't touch them with a barge pole (no generics, for christ's sake!). However, they haven't looked at this article since November 15, 2003, so maybe it still applies to .NET 2.0+. Who knows. You'd hope they'd have fixed this epic fail bug by now.

I reckon that Visual Studio or SQL Server must have made that change in the registry, because I don't have this problem on my computer at work (Java programming, so no VS). I've also always had this problem on my home machines and I've also always has VS installed on them. Hopefully, Microsoft didn't disable it for a good reason, because I've undone it now... but somehow I doubt they'd deliberately be breaking performance counters. After all, the people who actually use them are probably .NET developers and they almost definately use Visual Studio.