Visual Studio 2008 - Winforms Toolbox items gone

Question

For whatever reasons, suddenly, all the usual tabs in the Toolbox of my Visual Studio 2008 (SP1, Prof.) are gone :-(

I only have stuff like WPF Interoperability, Visual Basic PowerPacks and so forth left. Where did all the usual tabs go?? Can't even add a button and a label anymore!

Tried to repair VS2008, run devenv.exe with /setup, /resetskippkgs and a few more command line options, and even re-installed the whole thing from my ISO file - no luck......

Any ideas?? What am I missing? Yes, I'd love to move to VS2010 - but I still need to be able to use my VS2008 for my Winforms apps...... any hints would be most welcome!

Answer 1

There might be several things involved depending on the particular defect - the most common cause seems to be a messed toolbox cache, see Tip: Missing controls in Toolbox - Visual Studio 2008.

This tip has been confirmed several times already and is included in the Toolbox Missing Controls thread too, where you can find several other suggestions as well in case it doesn't address your problem.