Visual Web Developer 2005 Express loads very slowly

Question

I admit that I am not a guru of Visual Studio products at all. I am using Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition and I'm trying to load someone else's project.

This project happens to be a website with many pages.

After loading VWD, it asks for a project to open and I select the solution file. It then proceeds to take an extremely long time to load. The status bar indicates that references are being loaded, many of which are in the System.Web.* area it seems. It seems like it's going back and forth between some different packages. The loading time is upwards of 20 to 30 minutes or more. Some others have stated that their projects open fine when they go to File > Open Website... and choose the project directory from there. Any ideas what the problem could be and how to fix it?

Edit: It finally completed loading after an hour approximately.

Answer 1

How much memory do you have on that computer? I very much doubt that the problem is related directly to the actual reference loading.

Answer 2

It take a very long time for me to load VWD projects as well, across five different machines with varying amounts of RAM, all the way up to 2GB which should be enough for any practical purposes. I've learned to live with it.

One suggestion though, update to 2008.

Answer 3

I ended up finding my own solution.

I am missing one of the resources (Crystal Reports) because it does not work with the Express version of VWD. Instead of warning me of this, it just cycles through trying to load references all day for some reason.

The solution seems to be deleting the web.config file and recreating it from SVN.

If you can explain why this occurs you can get a winning answer.