VS2008 won't run any exe, layout lost on every run

Question

There I was happily debugging my code, when I did a restart, and even though VS said it was running my application, nothing showed.

When I hit stop, VS emptied itself of everything - solution explorer, all opened files, and all of the other panes (output, properties, etc.).

I've tried rebooting. Doesn't help.

Tried creating an empty (default) winforms project. Checked it runs ok standalone. Try running it from VS, same thing.

Do I really have to reinstall the whole caboodle?

(If I do a pause, I get 'No symbols to display', and I'm not smart enough to know what to do with the Disassembly - though the Address says System.Threading.WaitHandle.WaitOne).

Answer 1

Visual Studio has following command line switches may help out with the problem:

• /ResetAddin Removes commands and command UI associated with the specified Add-in.
• /ResetSettings Restores the IDE's default settings, optionally resets to the specified VSSettings file.
• /ResetSkipPkgs Clears all SkipLoading tags added to VSPackages.
• /SafeMode Launches Visual Studio in safe mode, loading only the default environment and services, and shipped versions of third party packages.

Try to use those switches to see if there is any luck. This can help you to rule out the problem casued by 3rdpart plug-ins.

Also, you may want to use Process Explorer to see if Visual Studio really created the debugging process, and inspect its status to see if there is any hint.