MSP430, Entering and Exiting low Power Modes while Debugging

On a recent project I had one heck of a time trying to debug the program flow in CCS 4.2.  I thought the code wasn’t going anywhere because when I would break the program, it would stop on a line before where it should have been executing.  After a couple days of troubleshooting with an oscilloscope, logic analyzer and TI, I got the bugs worked out of the program, but never did get a good answer as to why there was a debugging problem.  There are known issues with putting  a breakpoint right after an entry into a low power mode (LPM), but avoiding that didn’t solve it.

My advice to you is to find some unused pins and use those attached to a logic analyzer or oscilloscope to see what is going on.  Hopefully this makes it into Google and saves someone a lot of time.