Visual Studio 2008 IDE crash

Question

I have the following configuration:

• Visual Studio Team System 2008
• SQL Server Developer Edition 2008
• GDR2

on a Win XP SP3 workstation.

I have no add-ins.

All patches have already been applied for Visual Studio, Sql Server and Windows.

The event log does not show anything either.

My IDEs for Management Studio (ssms.exe) and VS (devenve.exe) keep crashing on me a few times a day. I have tried uninstallilng and reinstalling both VS2008 and SQL, but no luck.

How can I start figuring out what else is wrong and fix it?

Answer 1

Does it crash when you do a specific thing? Can you find any log which contains any helpful info?

The information you provided is insufficient to know what the problem is, but as a guideline you should do the following :

• Have Visual Studio log its activity for troubleshooting.
• Try to uninstall or turn off all addons of the IDE, some plugins can crash the whole IDE, and this is a very common cause of VS crash. or :
• Use the /SafeMode option which prevent all addons from being loaded.
• Download and install all the available Windows updates.
• Download and install all the available updates and hotfixes for Visual Studio.
• If nothing worked, you can report this to Microsoft, and wait for their feedback.

Answer 2

I wrote an article a while back called How to debug crashes and hangs. In it I illustrate how to determine what is Visual Studio doing during a crash, shows how to get a call stack, save a minidump and report a problem to Microsoft. If you file a bug on http://connect.microsoft.com/visualstudio/feedback and attach a call stack and minidump, chances are high that we will be able to help you.

If you'd like to investigate your problem, I suggest you read the article I linked above, get a call stack (with symbols loaded), log a connect bug and attach the call stack and minidump with heap (they will help you to attach a heap since it's a very big file).

Hope this helps,

Kirill Osenkov

Visual C# IDE QA, Microsoft

http://blogs.msdn.com/kirillosenkov