I use Visual Studio Community 2019 with C++ (no .Net). Yesterday I updated to version 16.7.1. Ever since then, Visual Studio hangs on exit at the step "Unloading Projects". No projects are unloaded, and the progress bar never starts moving. The program simply hangs and is unresponsive. The only way out is to kill the process.
It also hangs whenever I try to change the Configuration target for the solution. Both issues occur on any of my solutions that I open. I have tried using Visual Studio Installer to repair the install, but it makes no difference. The installer does report one issue: Couldn't repair Microsoft.AspNetCore.TargetingPack.3.1.3.1.3 But this hardly seems like it matters to my Win32 projects.
This problem definitely started as soon as I updated to 16.7.1. I don't recall the previous version I had, but I had just updated a few days before so it was probably 16.7. I am posting to see if others have this problem and if anyone has found a solution (other than falling back a version). I will limp along with it for now.
Same happened to me. Just use visual studio 2017. Only thing that fixed it for me.
After opening project (new or old) Visual Studio shows warning "Designer terminated unexpectedly" (can see in the picture below). What could cause this error? And how to fix that?
I clicked "click here to reload the designer" and it shows the same error.
I had the same issue and found out that my Oracle VirtualBox causes the issue.
My Visual Studio runs in a virtual Windows 10 enviroment.
After I disabled "Enable 3D Acceleration" in options Display, my Visual Studio Designer worked fine again.
I just had a similar problem. Tried:
Clicking to reload the designer
Cleaning my solution
Restarting Visual Studio
Repairing Visual Studio
Uninstalling and re-installing Visual Studio!
It ended up being graphics related, as you mentioned.
I have hybrid graphics (Intel and NVIDIA), and was using NVIDIA for Visual Studio. Changed it to Intel and this worked.
If it helps, a screenshot of my NVIDIA control panel is below:
Before (broken):
After (working):
Some people have found a file "c:\program" that causes this, often created by typo creating a log file.
Check to see if this file exists, and if so, move or delete it.
Graphics card was the problem for me. I have an external USB video from DisplayLink and when I disconnected it the problems went away. in fact it didn't return when I reconnected the displaylink.
Start Visual Studio As Administrator~!
I had the same problem when i started working in Team Projects, so almost everything did not work including the designer, properties menu, debugging and so on.. (which is totally unusual for anything to cause all these problems except for Administrator Privileges issues probably in most cases).
Don't know why or what caused it, but at least it works.
In my case it was the problem with using system brushes as ThemeResource. Yes this is apparently a bug like other odd bugs in MS products. So I had to comment out them until I finished my project. I don't know, maybe another factor such as my graphic hardware was not ineffective but this does not exonerate MS.
Since some days Visual Studio is stealing the focus. The weird thing is, this happens when using other applications in Windows (such as Chrome) but also when working in Visual Studio (such as typing).
My considerations so far:
It only happens when VS is running.
Happens in VS 2012 Premium and in VS 2012 Professional.
Also happens in Safe Mode.
Tried reinstalling. No success.
Uninstalled 3rd-party extensions. No success.
The focus goes to "nowhere" - I don't see any application or window having the focus. Also a [Windows]+[Array up] does not maximize anything.
[Alt]+[Space] has no effect.
[Alt]+[F4] has no effect.
I'm running Windows 8.1.
Does anyone have an idea what the cause is, or what I can do to further analyze it?
It seems I found the cause by disabling background tasks step-by-step. The focus stealing was gone when I killed the QuickSet application on my Dell XPS 13. I also read on Dell forums that others were having similar problems with focus stealing. The strange thing is, that it only happened when VS was running.
But anyway, as VS is more important to me I decided to split up with QuickSet. :'-(
My Visual Studio began crashing at start-up. In my search for finding a remedy, I found these two suggestions, but neither worked for me:
Launching Visual Studio while running in safe mode, and
Running repair on Visual Studio.
However, I found that if I logged into a different Windows account, Visual Studio was able to run from that account without crashing.
Here is an error code that that I observed in the crash report:
LCID: 1033
Can anyone provide a solution for returning my Visual Studio to working order?
For me it turned out to be the plugin that GitExtensions installed into Visual Studio 2013.
-- UPDATE: try this before uninstalling GitExtensions
#Enceradeira proposed in the comments to uncheck the Show current branch in Visual Studio option. In GitExtensions, you get there via Tools -> Settings -> Appearance:
-- END OF UPDATE
After uninstalling GitExtensions and reinstalling it with all VS plugin unselected my VS runs smoothly again.
I even put together a blog post about this issue because it bugged me so much.
Since you're able to run with another user login, something may be wrong with your local settings, you can try to reset them: devenv /resetsettings in Start menu -> Run.
Warning: this will restore visual studio to default settings.
In my case VS used to crash on a single solution. I resolved the problem by deleting the respective solutions's user file: SolutionName.suo
My colleague recently experienced a problem with Visual Studio 2013 crashing on start-up. Unfortunately, we found that the approach recommended in the answer by #Arun M did not solve the problem:
devenv.exe /ResetSettings
...however, using a different command line argument did:
devenv.exe /ResetUserData
An easy way to run devenv.exe is via the Visual Studio command prompt; on Windows 10, it can be found here:
Start Button => All Apps => Visual Studio 2013 => Visual Studio Tools =>
VS2013 x86 Native Tools Command Prompt
For more about these command line arguments for devenv.exe, see this answer to this related question: How do I truly reset every setting in Visual Studio 2012?. ⚠ In particular, please note the cautionary statement in that answer about the /ResetUserData command line argument!
Try to run VS as administrator. That's necessary in my case.
If coincident to these Visual Studio crashes you are getting "Heap corruption" (Exception code: 0xc0000005) errors in your Windows Application log (Faulting module name: WindowsCodecs.dll), here is something worth checking into: A faulty WIC component within Expression Blend can cause ALL versions of Visual Studio to crash upon launch, as well as cause Internet Explorer to crash upon visiting many, if not most sites. Even though Microsoft distributes this component, they call it a "non-Microsoft component". As such, a Visual Studio reinstall won't fix this,, an OS reinstall over existing Windows installation won't fix this, and a system file integrity check won't detect it.
If my case, the misbehaving codec was "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Expression\Common\Imaging\4.0.360.0\PSDCodec.dll", and simply unregistering this component got my Visual Studio working again from consistent startup launch crashes.
I post this in hopes this solution to one source of Visual Studio crashing might save others from the $500 Microsoft support incident fee and week of downtime this caused me.
I just changed the windows language in the bottom right to "EN", then started as admin. And it worked, interesting..
I had the very strange phenomenon that both Visual Studio 2010 and 2013 on a Windows 7 machine crashed when run in a remote desktop session, started from a Windows 10 pc. Debugging the crash showed a CultureNotFound exception. It was caused by regional settings on the Windows 10 pc, which could not be translated in something understood by Windows 7. I had language English(Belgium) with an Azerty keyboard. I added and selected English(UK) with an Azerty keyboard and the crashes disappeared. No other programs suffered from this.
For me it was being caused by Web Essentials and I was able to resolve by disabling it, restarting VS, enabling it back , restart again. Works now.
I had a crash on startup (or soon after startup, before opening any solution) occurring in git2-msvstfs.dll, caused by placing a 3GB temp file into a directory within my solution. Deleting the file fixed it.
Once I accidentally pressed a random key combination (maybe something like ctrl+', but I didn’t realize I was holding ctrl down so I forgot what keys I hit by the time I realized something bad had happened) that resulted in VS Professional 2017 15.3.5 crashing within half a minute. After relaunching, I found that VS would be interactive for a few seconds before it would crash within half a minute. It was really too fast for me to try to figure out what I had accidentally activated or for me to disable it before VS would crash. Also, it would even crash if I didn’t open any solution, so I figured it was not something that deleting a .vs (per project/solution Solution Explorer/open files state) folder would fix.
To fix, I followed Arun M’s comment and renamed my %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\VisualStudio\15.0_3f4d04be folder. You will need to adjust the path for the edition/version of VS that is crashing. On my machine, I think 15.0_3f4d04be is Professional and 15.0_0fed6c59 is VS Community Edition. You’ll probably have to guess based on the folder’s modification timestamp which is probably going to reflect the date you last used that edition of VS.
After renaming the versioned dotfolder, VS launched without crashing. It started with default settings but automatically restored some of my settings through the cloud sync stuff after a minute of running and it even remembered my account information so I didn’t need to sign in.
I did not need to rename my %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\VSCommon folder (which Arun M had also suggested).
I had a similar problem, both VS2015 and VS2013 would crash at startup. Tracked it down to an application I installed which put .net 4.7.2 on the system. Once i removed that app, removed .net, and reinstalled .net 4.6, Visual Studio started working again.
I have problem with Visual Studio 2010 on Windows 7 64-bit. After some time of work VS starts consuming ~50% CPU and UI responding slows down. When I close VS then UI disappear but process stay.
When I forgot to kill those hung processes at the end of day, I will end up with numerous devenv.exe processes.
I have reinstall Visual Studio and reinstall Windows and ended up with the same problem... doesn't change anything. Please help. :/
Remove and/or uninstall all third-party Visual Studio add-ins and extensions. Disabling is not good enough.
Visual Studio 2010 relies heavily on graphics. Therefore:
Update your video driver.
Turn off "Enable rich client visual
experience"
Turn off "Use Hardware graphics acceleration if
available"
There are also temporary files that Visual Studio uses that may need to be cleared out.
Clear out your %temp% folder.
Clear out %AppData%\Local\Microsoft\WebsiteCache
Clear out %AppData%\Local\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0\ProjectAssemblies
Your project and solution user settings may be corrupt due to so many "crashes".
Delete .user and .suo files (you will lose the startup project, bookmarks, breakpoints, and other user settings specific to projects and solutions.)
Begin where you began before - it may seem overkill but this is the only way to be sure we are addressing everything short of hardware issues.
Reinstall Windows - make sure you are using a validly licensed copy, and patch the hell out of it before installing Visual Studio.
Note: I doubt it is a GPU driver issue, but it never hurts to use the most up to date driver and this is the place to do it right after a fresh OS install.
Install Visual Studio .Net 2010 but do not start it up. Let it get the frameworks installed fresh.
Use Windows Update to install the VS 2010 SP1 patch, and any/all patches for .Net frameworks.
Make an images for yourself right here so you have something to build from if you need to try this again. It will save you lots of time.
Fire up Visual Studio, and test your closing before installing anything else.
If it does not work here, there's likely some conflict between PC hardware and window OS, and you should try to find this symptom in other applications to get more info.
Here's what i would be looking for:
Does it happen EVERY TIME?
Does it happen after you debug your project ? does it happen for ALL projects?
Does it also happen when you don't load any projects? (simply start the IDE and wait).
Does it happen after a debug session of your application? maybe the application is not closed properly?
Do you have any other apps running at the same time that may cause this? try reproducing with a minimal set of apps/services running.
What are you doing exactly when it starts freezing ? anything in particular?
I would try to get 2-3 memory dumps at the time of hanging, post it here as well as to MSFT people. That would be a good start.