Path environment variable deleted and Visual Studio not working - visual-studio

Good morning,
I deleted the "path" environment variable and now I´m not able to open Visual Studio. I tried most of the solutions that have been commented in other threads, but most of them are based on a sistem recovery, which I didn´t have configured.
Most of the programms keep working, but I have problems with Visual Studio. I tried to reinstall it, but it still doesn´t work. I would like to know which are the "path"-s that Visual Studio needs to work in order to recover it.
I use Windows 10.

Related

Visual Studio doesn't run programs

I downloaded visual studio for C# and now my problem is that when I run a program the very first time it runs without issues but the second time after exiting the program it shows this (pressing f5 also does nothing):
I have tried repairing Visual Studio and uninstalling and reinstalling it but that also doesn't work. It happens to other files too like Python files or asp.net files. Anyone know what's going on?
Try setting your project as a StartUp Project.
See this answer for details.

Visual Studio 2017 freezes on startup

When I start VisualStudio it frezzes on the start screen. But when I start it a second time while the first instance is open the second instance works fine.
It's not that important but what could cause that problem?
Not sure. Sometimes some Visual Studio extensions are locking up Visual Studio.
I think by default Visual Studio tries to update these extensions
that have been installed automatically.
Recently I was trying to run Visual Studio (at Home) and it would freeze if I tried to open a specific project. But I was busy, so I didn't pursue it further and did other things. Then a week or a few days later I tried to run Visual Studio (at home), and it locked up when I ran it. I tried really hard to fix it.
There is a way I don't like where you can delete all or most of the
extensions from the place Visual Studio installs them, but this is
messy, and it is easy to get rid of something you need, and may hard
to get it back where it works correctly again. So I now recommend against this since there is a better solution now, below!
I searched to find a solution, and someone on a Microsoft board I think said to run from a command prompt as Administrator: DEVENV /RESETSETTINGS, I tried that and it didn't work for me. Then I thought, run DEVENV /? to see what I can see, and I saw :
DEVENV /SAFEMODE
So I tried that and it worked! Note: it was still being run from the Visual Studio Developer Prompt as an Administrator.
Visual Studio loaded up correctly, and I was able to look at the
installed extensions.
Eventually I noticed that they all or a lot of them were disabled (probably because of this SAFEMODE parameter), and I noticed that it the most recently updated were at the top of the list. I noticed that a lot of them had been automatically updated by Visual Studio and started Uninstalling a bunch of the more recent ones, and reverted at least one of them, then later uninstalled it. Eventually, after about 6 to 10 uninstalls, I got it to where Visual Studio would load normally, without the /SAFEMODE parameter! Cool!
So I turned off the automatic updates, so this will never happen automatically again. If I load a new extension or update and existing one manually, I should always exit Visual Studio and reload it after not doing too many updates or installing too many extensions to see if these extensions allow Visual Studio to load.
Sometimes an extension will not freeze Visual Studio, but will have errors. The ones that are the big problem are the ones which prevent Visual Studio from loading all the way and freezing it up. But with the above solution, you can eventually, cleanly, uninstall all the latest updates or new installed extensions until you finally get Visual Studio to load normally!
This workaround should be more widely known, so I am putting my solution to it here. Hopefully what I found should help someone else who is in a hurry, without having a lot of time to burn trying to get Visual Studio running again without freezing!
I use Visual Studio Community 2017, and I got this same issue on startup until I stumbled on this solution that deals with some corruption in the .suo file. Before I open Visual Studio for the day, I first delete the .suo file in my project folder, and it starts up just fine.
It's in a folder called .vs next to the .sln file. You may have to go to folder options View and check "Hidden Items" in order to find this folder. Dig down in that folder and you'll find the .suo file. Delete it. When you startup the project in Visual Studio, it will automatically create a new .suo file. So you'll have to do this every time you reopen.

Visual Studio and/or Windows Explorer Crash with TypeScript Files

In Windows Explorer, whenever I try to open a folder that contains TypeScript files, explorer freezes and crashes. When I try to edit TypeScript files in Visual Studio, it allows me to do so until I save the file. When I save the file, Visual Studio crashes without any dialogs.
I tried completely removing anything Visual Studio related (uninstall, registry clean, etc.) and reinstalling. I also tried running Windows in safe mode, and/or running Visual Studio in safe mode, none of which work. Running Visual Studio as an administrator also does not work.
I know it is not an issue with the actual repo since these files work fine on several other developer machines. This functionality was working just fine a month ago, with no changes in updates or installed extensions.
I am running Visual Studio 2015 Update 3 (14.0.25431.01) on a Windows 10 64-bit machine. TypeScript Tools for Visual Studio is at version 2.2.1.0.
Please let me know if there are any logs I can provide, I'm not sure where to get them.
The following update fixes this issue:
Cumulative Update for Windows 10 Version 1607 for x64-based Systems (KB4015438).
This is as of March 20, 2017.
UPDATE:
Many people have reported this issue as being the result of Windows Update KB4013429. This affects all Visual Studio installations. To resolve the issue, simply uninstall this update and restart your PC.
Old "Solution":
I solved the problem by reinstalling/cleaning Windows.
I know that's not a very good answer, but I wasn't able to solve the issue otherwise. Disabling antivirus shields did not work, and neither did running in safe mode. I think something in the registry may have gotten corrupted during a Visual Studio reinstall. Would love to hear any actual solutions if anyone else comes across this problem in the future.
I deleted a lot of stuff in the Registry under HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.ts, and now I can at least view folders in Explorer that contains .ts files, but I still cannot right-click them.
The biggest problem for me and my colleague was that Git and Visual Studio was unable to overwrite .ts files sometimes ("permission denied"), and we couldn't delete them manually either.
I'm not quite sure this has solved the problem permanently for me, but it seems so at the moment:
I used Handle to determine that SearchProtocolHost.exe had locked my .ts file, and wouldn't release until a few minutes later.
A few Google searches later, and I have now disabled indexing .ts files in Windows Search. So far, no more locks!

Visual Studio crash at start-up

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.

Visual Studio Debugging Issue

Seeing an issue when debugging in Visual Studio. All of the values under watch, and in the hover over window show up incorrectly. the only values that show properly, are values that are local to the method I am currently stepping through.
For example the watch value for 'this' when debugging shows the following under value
0x00000000ffac0388 { btnBack=0x00000000ffaccf20 btnReply=0x00000000ffacd200 btnForward=0x00000000ffacd420...}
some other variables show this, even though the variable is there.
error: 'this.foo' does not exist
The machine recently had windows 7 64 installed, since then this problem has occured.
Visual studio has been reinstalled on this machine, and we verified that the settings in visual studio were exactly the same as a different PC that is the same machine and config.
We finally figured out what the issue was. The devenv.exe was being set to run in xp compatibility mode (sp3). Doing a rebuild of the project after removing the compatibility mode fixed the issue.
Can you provide a bit more information to help us track down this problem. In particular
What operating system was installed before upgrading to Windows 7 64 bit?
Did you install Visual Studio before or after the upgrade?
Is there any other version of Visual Studio installed on the machine?
If you set your application to be x86 specific does the problem still repro?
What language is your code written in (assuming C#)?
When facing weird debugging issues, I find that deleting the solutions User Options file (.suo) usually fixes the problem. You will loose your bookmarks, breakpoints, any special exception handling, and so on.
If that fails then clear all your Visual Studio "temporary" files. Check out the "Clear Recent" script at http://missico.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!7178D2C79BA0A7E3!370.entry. Modify it for your own needs. For instance, I dislike Flash, so you may want to remove the call to ClearStupidFlash and the other non-Visual Studio calls. Clear your solution then "rebuild all".
If the problem still exists, then something else is going on.

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