What could cause VS2008 to crash and then take explorer.exe with it?

Question

This happens to me quite frequently...at least once every 1 or 2 weeks...and it is currently driving me insane.

I can be working in VS2008 performing the most basic of tasks and the entire program will stop responding. After waiting quite a while the only option I find myself with is to open the Task Manager and end the devenv.exe process.

Unfortunately, whenever I do this, explorer.exe stops responding too. The CPU usage hits 50% (since I'm on a dual core machine) and most of the applications I have running become inaccessible. If I terminate explorer.exe and then use the task manager to restart explorer.exe it always restarts with it using 100% of the core it is running on.

No matter what I try to solve this problem, the only way I've been able to solve this problem is by restarting my machine.

Now I can understand VS2008 crashing....it does tend to do that. But why does it have to take explorer.exe and the rest of my machine with it? Does anyone know why that is even possible? How can a failure in one process result in a cascade of failures in other programs?

Not sure if it makes a difference but I'm running WinXP Professional, VS2008 SP1, Resharper 4.5, PowerCommands for VS2008 1.0, GhostDoc, and TestDriven.NET 2.9.

Answer 1

Try uninstalling / removing all addins to Visual Studio.

Also, try running VS with either of these flags -

/ResetSkipPkgs or /SafeMode and see if the problem persists (info found at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/xee0c8y7%28VS.80%29.aspx)

I have seen similar issues with office where a faulty add in has hooks in processes and places you would not dream of, then a crash seems to take out the whole system!

Even if a addin is good, it is possible to have ones that conflict with each other and cause problems that you would never see from just running them separately.