cannot find w3wp.exe in VS

Same thing was happening to me, when i remembered that IIS has an idle timeout! As above the proc w3wp is running, but VS2010 looks at it in the sleep state and thinks its not running, so dos'nt show it in the list...

spinning up IIS [calling a site served from locahost in your favourite web browser] reactivates IIS and suddenly VS can see the process [w3wp] now too

NOTE - must ask MS to ignore the sleep state of IIS/w3wp and if it is in sleep mode - cause it to automatically wake up!