Pardon my bumping this thread in 2025. Having come into some of the mcu work late and acquiring various older dev boards like due using sam3 processors it has been a wall of frustration trying to get an Atmel-ICE programming/debugger running under Microchip Studio 7.0 (and I suspect the same for Atmel Studio 7.0) it seems that there is not only an issue with what drivers may be installed there is an issue also where apparently the atbackend.exe needs to be run with admin permissions.

This is only a preliminary post as I believe that one of the drivers installed is requiring admin privileges causing the backend to not start properly and hang while attempting to connect to the debugger.

Currently my solution to this problem is to run either Microchip Studio with admin privileges or to start normally, close the atbackend.exe by unchecking in options and to restart it from an admin terminal window. Has worked like a charm since.

When and if I figure out which driver I will update my findings. Until then I hope this will help those of us late comers to Atmel Studio/Microchip Studio working with older non-supported devices and development boards.

Again sorry for beating a near dead thread. Cheers!