Visual Studio 2005 hangs when opening markup files

Question

I'm working on a web application project in Visual Studio 2005 and as of the last day or two every time I open any markup file (ascx, aspx, etc) Visual Studio hangs and never recovers. If you try to click anything in the UI - code, menus, close window 'X' - I get the tray icon telling me that Visual Studio is busy and to continue waiting for it.

I never use the designer, so it's opening straight to the markup, which does seem to render before it hangs.

Any ideas? I haven't changed anything on the system lately, though I wouldn't put it past corp IT. I uninstalled ReShaper and the problem is still there.

Update: Uninstalled VisualSVN, tried to reset the environment, and it still hangs on markup files. My next step is going to be uninstalling SP1, repairing VS, and reinstalling SP1.

Update 2: Uninstalled SP1, but the repair of VS failed. Next step after rebooting is to uninstall VS.

Answer 1

You could try starting Visual Studio without add-ins loaded using the /SafeMode command line switch

devenv.exe /SafeMode

Another typical trouble-shooting step would be to delete all files created by Visual Studio from your solution (*.suo; *.ncb and the like).

Answer 2

While troubleshooting the issue with Microsoft we found that even though the project was set to use the webdev server, when Visual Studio was hanging it was trying to access data in the IIS metabase. It was unable to read the data as the 'World Wide Web Publishing' service was either in a starting or stopping state, rendering the data inaccessible.

The immediate workaround was to set the startup of this service to 'Manual' and reboot. With IIS cleanly stopped everything worked fine.

A few days passed before we were able to dig into what was preventing IIS from starting, and surprise, surprise, it was magically working again. The conclusion we came to is that one of the many draconian, IT-mandated McAfee applications was the culprit. An update had been published to this machine which seemed to have fixed the problem.

This was further confirmed on another machine I was setting up where McAfee was the only non-development software installed and it was exhibiting the same problem.