Why is Visual Studio constantly crashing?!

Question

Visual Studio randomly crashes when adding/removing references and projects. Any thoughts why? Will installing Sp1 help?

EDIT: I do not work with any addons except SourceSafe. I do most of my development in connected mode.

Developing using:
Visual Studio 2008
WinXp Terminal Service -> Win2k3 Sp2 (64bit)
VSS 8.0, 32bit

Answer 1

Will installing Sp1 help?

Probably

Answer 2

Search for and delete any .ncb files associated with your solution. In past versions these (debugging) files used to get corrupt and deleting them would fix the problem (Visual Studio will regenerate them automatically).

Answer 3

Try to attach a debugger and see if you get some more information.

Answer 4

I Find on mine even in SP1 that it crashes rarely when adding stuff to a project, but mainly when switching to an ASP.NET Design View and when it autogenerates controls in the tools. I just disabled it from creating them and i dont get many crashes any more.

I know this doesnt have much to do with your issue, but the point i am making SP1 may not be the answer to your problem.

Answer 5

I've found that if I add references in the project settings, it crashes; but if I add references in the Solution Explorer, it doesn't.

Answer 6

Try deleting your .user and .suo files - these are the user options files that VS creates. You get a .user file for each project and a .suo file for your solution. When they get corrupted, odd things happen. Deleting them will make you lose little things like which project is selected as the startup project when you start debugging, but it usually clears up odd behavior like this.

You may also want to clear out any temporary file locations, like the Temporary ASP.NET Files folders (if you're working in ASP.NET) just in case something odd is being cached somewhere.

Answer 7

Most commonly, if Visual Studio is crashing repeatedly, your .suo or .ncb file has become corrupted. Close your project, delete those files, and reopen. This may resolve your problem.

Answer 8

My Visual Studio 2005 started crashing and locking up recently. The way I finally fixed it was to run this from the command line:

devenv /resetuserdata

That cleared out all my customisations, but it did fix the problem. If you've customised VS a lot, you could try exporting your settings first and then see if you can safely import them afterwards. Alternatively, take snapshots of your IDE so you can remember which buttons etc. you had where.

Answer 9

Offtopic, but you may want to see this:

Visual SourceSafe Version Control: Unsafe at any Speed?

http://www.developsense.com/testing/VSSDefects.html