Frame Timing and Debugging

Hi there, Im trying to debug my game using the visual C++ debugger however im finding it impossible to ''break'' the execution of my code to snoop around and then to recomence execution without my game timer having advanced by however long i was snooping around for. This results in all the sprites litterally jumping to new positions as there movement is dependant on this timer. I tried to implement some code in my message handler that would detect when my game was or wasnt the active window. When it would become inactive it would set a flag so that when its activated again the frame timer would be tricked into thinking only 30ms had passed since the end of the last frame. This works fine when i play the game normally but it seems that MS visual studio doesnt deactivate the games window when i use the break command thus not setting the flag and thus allowing for a huge time span to be recorded in my global timer variable. How then do i solve this problem. Any help would be greatly appreciated.