In VS2008, can't close designer view before studio crashes

Question

In Visual Studio, a certain project has a designer window open which is crashing visual studio. As soon as I open visual studio it crashes. I know that if I could close that designer, I'd be back in business. But I can't click the close button on the designer view before studio crashes.

What should I do?

Note: I tried devenv.exe /safemode. When I tried this, the designer still was open and the DevExpress suite loaded, and the guage control was showing on the design surface, and then studio crashed.

Answer 1

If the project is part of a Visual Studio Solution you can delete the solution user options file ([Solution File Name].suo). This way Visual Studio will not open any files when starting.

You would probably continue to have the problem as soon as you open that designer though.

Answer 2

You can turn on logging on DEVENV. Start the environment as follows:

devenv.exe /log

The output is written to

%USERPROFILE%\Application Data\Microsoft\Visual Studio\8.0\ActivityLog.xml