Hello Wombat,
The option 'step into' was greyed out in the IDE's 'debug' view, when I had not started program execution yet. The option of stepping into execution is something I knew from the Visual Studio environment, so it just caught my attention that it was not there.
So.. why would anybody step through the nitty-gritty details of crt0.s. The reason is that the first C-statement in my main() routine was not reached. Instead, the ISS bailed out, indicating that a non-initialized value was read. So, I wanted to know where execution flow decided to generate an ISS error instead of reaching main().
I can see now that crt0.s is executed succesfully, and the ISS error is thrown in a strcmp() in the context of system initialization of the timer. Haven't figured out why, yet.
Anyway, my question regarding this issue has been answered so thank you for the replies !
http://forum.niosforum.com/work2/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/cool.gif