How can I fix Visual Studio 2005 unresponsiveness?

Question

My VS 2005 goes unresponsive all the time. I have tried all of the optimization tricks that have been listed on StackOverflow. I am running with Resharper 4.1. (not sure if that could cause this). What other ways could I try to isolate the root issue here?

Is it possible upgrading to VS 2008 might help me?

More details: - scrolling up and down on the solution explorer - collapsing projects - seems pretty random

More details again: - also it seems worse if i am remoting into a machine. I look at the top caption and it looks like it keeps getting enabled / disabled as if i am switching from one app to another (but i am not). any ideas ??

Answer 1

Actually it sounds like maybe something other than VS is hogging your computer. Try leaving task manager or process explorer open and check what's consuming CPU or disk when the freeze-ups occur.

Answer 2

In my experience, could be an overactive antivirus software, or some hardware flaws. Try to replicate the environment on another PC (same Visual Studio version, same updates, same add-ins) and work with the same projects.

If it's behaving the same on other PC, another approach would be to deactivate the add-ins one at the time, and find the guilty one.

Answer 3

Did you try loading Visual Studio without any addins?

Answer 4

1) If you're remoting to it, then turn off animations. I turn it off all the time, that 0.5 second window slide in is slowing me down! But it is really bad on a remote desktop or VM.

In VS2008 this is at: Tools - Options - Environment - Animate Environment Tools

2) Outlook seems to not play nicely with VS2005. I don't remember why, but on one machine if I had Outlook+VS2005 open then VS would be terribly slow. I haven't had this problem in VS2008.

Answer 5

I have had the very same issue as well for many months now. When I open a different tab, start debugging, close a tab, or even sometimes just edit the code, my installation of VS2005 will hang for 5-10 seconds, sometimes longer. I've tried running it without Outlook running, disabling Edit and Continue, enabling the LARGEADDRESSAWARE switch with the Visual Studio Command Line (4gb of RAM in a 32 bit machine), and nothing seems to work. I'm going to try defragging my hard drive this weekend but I don't think that a fragmented hard drive would have such a pronounced effect on an application.

If you found a way to fix your problem, I'd really love for you to share it here.