Can I open a solution without opening its documents, or clearing the user options?

Question

I have a solution which, when opened, crashes VS2008. This has happened before and I can work around the problem by deleting the SUO file. But that clears all my other options too, in particular the set of exceptions to break on, and setting them up again is very annoying.

Is there a way to open a solution without opening its documents, or clearing the user options?

Answer 1

You might consider opening Visual Studio in safe mode. This can be done by running devenv from the command line:

devenv /SafeMode

If that will launch you, open the solution, close all windows, close the solution, close Visual Studio and restart in normal mode. Before opening any windows, do a full rebuild.