Due to continuing crash problems, I'm about to uninstall and reinstall my copy of Visual Studio 2005. I know that just running the uninstaller leaves a lot of resources and settings on my machine and would like to be able to reinstall from a pristine state.
Is there any way to completely uninstall VS2k5 from my machine so that it's as if it was never there?
sure, it starts with 'format c:' :)
Seriously though, I've had that type of issue with various MS products. Clean uninstalls are almost impossible because even windows hasn't kept track of what shared DLLs were installed by VS2005. You could try installing VS express, hope that it overwrites whatever problem is there, and then reinstall VS2005, but I wouldn't hold my breath on it working.
The other possibility is that it's something local to your user. You could try moving your folder under documents and settings and getting it to regenerate and see if that works...
If DevStudio is crashing a lot on you, you might try uninstalling any add-ins and extensions as a first step.
It might save you a lot of pain.
Rebuild your machine. Things just get mucked up after a while, and in the process you'll clean out all the muck you've accumulated in Windows in addition to the Visual Studio muck. It seems harsh, but after you do it a couple times it's really faster, less painful, and more complete than trying to track down a bunch of random issues.