I'm aware of this thread, in which the question restricts to source control issues.
In my case, it's more general. From time to time, Visual Studio will just crash randomly, even without user input.
I usually close all my files and clean my project to avoid further crashes, and I eventually crash again, without really knowing why.
Do you have some tip and tricks to avoid random crashes?
Edit : I've installed SP1, I'm running Vista on a Q6600 with 4gb RAM
I'd look at any plug-ins you're using or source control integrations.
The place I'm contracting at now uses Visual Source Safe (I know...) and the VSS integration causes me a few crashes. Especially when I've got a lot of files open, and event more so on start-up when it's checking (presumably) the status of all my open files at once.
At home I use VS2008 with the Ankh SVN plug-in and it never crashes.
You get OutOfMemoryException? Check the size of the .suo file. I had problems with this in VS 2005, but i havent reproduced it on 2008. The .suo file would bloat, repeating a single line of code thousands, and eventually millions of times. Each time i saved, this would grow the .suo file a few megabytes.
There are way too many reasons any program will "just crash". You are posing an inherently unanswerable question. Hell, it might even be some other software on your machine that is causing VS to crash, so no matter what you do to VS, it would never solve the real problem.
There are basically 3 reasons why VS may crash.
1) Buggy or improperly installed plug-ins. 2) Bad hardware, ie memory. It might only crash once in a while. 3) A bug in VS.
1 is often hard to track down.
2 is also hard to track down because memory can fail intermittently. Visual Studio is such a large program that it's much more likely to occupy bad memory than most other programs you run.
3 VS certainly has bugs, but I've never run into one where it just crashes without doing anything, so i'd doubt this.
If it's being caused by an add-on, and you happen to be running a 64-bit operating system, then there's hope yet! Microsoft released a hotfix that corrects the VS2008 crashing that ReSharper and other add-ons tend to cause. It can be found here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/947841.
When Visual Studio crashes on you, do you get a dialog asking you to send details to Microsoft? If you do, click on "What does this report contain" and google for key parts of the header, you might find some hotfix or KB article on your problem.
See http://tinyurl.com/VSdeath for a bunch of workarounds that (usually) work