Visual Studio 2008 Find dialog takes >2s to appear

Question

For some reason my Visual Studio Find dialog, which usually shows instantly after I press Ctrl+F, has started to take more than 2 seconds to show. During this time Visual Studio is entirely unresponsive.

2 seconds for a small window to show is outrageous :) Restarting VS or rebooting the machine didn't help. Has anyone seen this before? How can I fix this?

OS: Vista x64; Defrag: Weekly, at night

Answer 1

I like to use ctrl-f3. You just position your cursor on the word you want to find, and it will allow you to step through each occurance by pressing f3

Edit: Another option would be to dock the find dialog - so it doesn't require closing and reopening.

Answer 2

While your issue is very specific and would be hard to answer, without a lot more detail.

Look through this question on optimizing Visual Studio.

If these don't speed it up, I would look to Microsoft for support.

Answer 3

I find that intellisense drains a lot of resources. Since I don't need it (using Visual Assist X) I disabled it. Also see this StackOverflow question containing more info.

Answer 4

CodeRush Xpress (free add-on) has a useful 'Quick Find' feature that tracks down line numbers, text matches, etc.

Answer 5

Have you tried deleting the project's .ncb file? It's where VS stores Intellisense data and it seems to just grow forever as the project changes. It will be automatically recreated by VS without all the cruft if you just delete it.

Answer 6

Fixed by reinstalling Visual Studio.

P.S. This has happened again; here's what I observed this time:

• Visual Studio was running when a major disk defrag occurred.
• Halfway through the major disk defrag the UI (and the Find dialog in particular) started taking a long time to appear. During the slowdowns the Visual Studio process spends a lot of CPU time in the kernel (according to ProcExp)
• A Windows Update was pending.
• Restarting Visual Studio did not help fix the problem.
• Applying the windows update and restarting the OS fixed the problem.

Answer 7

Trade ya. Mine comes up in half a micron but the Find button is always disabled and I can't search :(

Not that it matters because when it did, I could be STARING right AT the text in a .CS file and the find in files still won't find the text I'm STARING AT!