Visual Studio keeps crashing

Question

Hi there,

Visual studio team system 2008 keeps crashing on me. Sometimes it just freezes, or certain parts of the UI get messed up or a weird popup box saying something about unable to load parameters or saying something else about memory or any other number of things.

it usually happens when I do a "complex" task like go into debug mode or do a search across of whole solution or run a unit tests or something like that.

I rebooted my machine countless time, reinstalled it VS, changed my virtual memory settings, flush my page file on every reboot and anything else i could think of.

It seems like VS runs out memory or something.

I have a powerfully machine with lots of RAM so that's not the issue

any suggestions?

Answer 1

You can always try some standard Visual Studio troubleshooting steps:

• Clean the solution
• Delete / rename all files in your solution created by VS, i.e. all .ncb, .suo, .user files
• Launch Visual Studio with all add-ins disabled: devenv.exe /SafeMode
• Reset All Settings: Tools -> Import / Export Settings -> Reset All Settings
• Delete HKCU:\Software\Micosoft\VisualStudio\9.0 and then restart Visual Studio
• Repair the Visual Studio installation through Add/Remove Programs

You might also check whether there is a hotfix available addressing your issue (e.g. KB960075 sounds like a good candidate for you), or whether you find your problem already reported on the Connect website.

Answer 2

The first step is to uninstall all 3rd party add-ins on Visual Studio. In particular if you have multiple add-ins as they can interfere with each other in unexpected ways and cause crashes. After uninstalling repeat your scenarios and see if this fixes the issue.

If not then it's best to consult the application log and find out why Visual Studio is crashing. The log will contain at least the error code of the crash which can searched on google or reposted here for us to take a look at.

Answer 3

Assuming this occurs with VS up to date with all service packs installed, you might try some of these suggestions. If you haven't tried with service packs, do that first.

What version of Windows are you using? If it is Windows 7, try launching Visual Studio with a compatibility mode and see if that resolves the issue. To do this, make a copy of the normal launch shortcut and go into the Properties dialog and set it to run as Windows Vista.

If this doesn't fix it, then you might also consider:

• Checking your PATH environment for any weird settings which might be confusing it, e.g. paths pointing to other SDKs
• Any 3rd party VS extensions such as source control, refactoring plugins, wizards etc.
• Old versions of .NET or SQL server

Also test if the issue occurs for every kind of project or just certain kinds, e.g. does it happen for all projects? Does it happen in C++, C#, VB.NET projects etc.

Answer 4

If you believe that you've gotten VS into a wired state, you can try the following command line switches

• devenv.exe /ResetSettings (This will reset the visual studio settings to the defaults)

If that doesn't help, as a last resort, you can try

• devenv.exe /ResetUserData

Answer 5

You can also attach a debugger to Visual Studio, to see what it's doing. Sometimes a particular .sln will trigger bad behavior or more likely, some third-party add-on.