visual studio 2008 intellisense disappearing after 1 second

Question

I'm having a weird problem in visual studio where I'll type a namespace/class/whatever, and intellisense will pop up as expected, but before I can highlight or read anything, it will disappear. If I ctrl-space or ctrl-j, then it will pop up again, but again it will disappear after less than a second. If I move real fast and start pushing the up and down arrows, then it will stay up as long as I keep pushing keys. As soon as I stop, it disappears again.

I have tried closing/reopening the project, turning intellisense off and back on, logging off and back on, and all other combinations I can think of, and nothing seems to help. I can get it to work temporarily by creating a new project, then closing the solution and opening my existing project in that devenv instance, but I'd really prefer to not have to do that forever. :)

This is on a development box that I connect to through mstsc, and none of the other developers on that box seem to be having this problem.

Anybody have any ideas?

Answer 1

I've had the same issues. I tried all the usuall stuff including deleting the ncb file and still couldn't get it to work. Sometimes it would just lie to me and make me think that there is no valid overload for this function or that the function call was just incorrect to begin with even though it compiles and runs. I tried Visual Assist X and the problems have mostly all gone. Itellisense can be very hard but visual assist x does a very good job and probbaly the closest to correct you can get. Also see:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/498319/visual-studio-intellisense-problems-and-linux-compatibility

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/39474/how-to-get-intellisense-to-reliably-work-in-visual-studio-2008

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/178846/visual-studio-intellisense-stopped-working

Answer 2

Aww this happens to me a lot.. damnit i forgot what i do.. I think as soon as it pops up, i scroll down to a random property/method and choose it. Then i delete it and press "." again and its back to normal.

Answer 3

I had this problem as well. Sadly the only way we could find of fixing it was to re-install VS2008.

Answer 4

there is an option VCExpress /ResetSetting

could be somewhat different for different editions (i recall msdev.exe, devenv.exe)

find out your options by issuing

msdev.exe /?

Answer 5

Another application, an visual studio add-in, or something else, is stealing the focus. That is why IntelliSense is disappearing.