Visual Studio Crashing When I Select Text in Code Editor

Question

I just installed VS 2010 and had no errors, but whenever I'm in the code editor and try to select text, either by CTRL-A, SHIFT-ARROW or click and drag the program crashes.

Here is the debug info:

EventType : clr20r3 P1 : devenv.exe P2 : 10.0.30319.1 P3 : 4ba1fab3 P4 : uiautomationprovider P5 : 4.0.0.0 P6 : 4ba1f837 P7 : 3
P8 : 0 P9 : system.dllnotfoundexception

The only mention of it I an find on google is this link, to which I have just posted:

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/vseditor/thread/7e8983f8-48c5-4c6c-acef-c6c128a3baa6

Answer 1

The .NET 4.0 install did not go well. The missing DLL is supposed to be present in C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\assembly\GAC_MSIL\UIAutomationProvider\v4.0_4.0.0.0__31bf3856ad364e35

Reinstalling .NET 4.0 would be your next move. But do worry a bit about your machine stability, DLLs don't just disappear or not get installed.

Answer 2

This is certainly not the defualt behavior for Visual Studio. The most likely cause of the crash is a 3rd party plugin. Try disabling any plugin and repeating the scenario.

Answer 3

Taking some of Nick's advice, when it errored out, I debugged it in Visual Studio. It gave me "Unable to load DLL 'UIAutomationCore.dll'. The specified module could not be found." I googled that and arrived at

http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/564071/vs2010-unhandled-net-exception-after-clicking-in-any-xaml-document

which told me to install

Apparently installing the latest version of the UI Automation API solved the problem. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=cd55456d-9703-42a0-b982-8a8a89ca0aa3&displaylang=en

And that fixed the issue :)