I'm running Visual Studio 2015 Update 3.
I have Resharper 2016.2.2 and various other VSIX plugins installed.
After about 10~30 minutes of use, a few things may happen (this is quite vague):
Inability to close visual studio, pressing close shows the "Visual Studio has encountered an unexpected error." I have to task manager/kill app to close and restart.
Partial loss of keyboard, backspace etc stop working, Ctrl-F4 stops, but regular alphanumeric typing works. (but other system features like saving files stops as well)
Searching for symptoms everyone seems to allude to something but none of the options found appear to work. Is there a more intelligent approach to determining (i assume it is a plugin at fault) which plugin/extension is causing the error. (Ie does VS dump a log file of errors or can I run in debug mode or something ) to attempt to isolate the offending 'thing'.
Edit: 28/11/2016. Uninstalled all plugins + resharper. Still occurring (the "unexpected error" and loss of keyboard operation). Seems to like a reinstall to fix. Ugh.
If you believe the problem lies within a plugin or recent update then simply undo that update or disable any recently installed plugins. Test VS after these changes in hopes to narrow down the plugin causing the issue. If that doesn't fix your problem visual studio does have a debug mode but you must download the Microsoft installer from their official website and select the debug option in the installer menu. if that fails too then i suggest just uninstalling VS and attempt to install the software again.
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.
Starting today, I noticed that the Exceptions dialog within VS2010 appears empty, and I can therefore not make any selections within it. I am not sure where to go to begin trying to fix this, as I see no error or anything. This has previously worked. Following is a screenshot:
I have tried checking if any updates were installed recently (none were), and no new updates are available. Any help would be appreciated.
You could try starting visual studio in safe mode by starting it with the /SafeMode command line option. Once open, see if the exceptions are there - changing a setting here may reset the view back when you start Visual Studio normally.
Alternatively, try resetting Visual studio back to its original settings by starting it with the /Setup command line option.
I have Win 7 Enterprise. If i open any .cs file on VS 2008/2010 it gives a message " Visual Studio has stopped working" on a dialog box. There are two buttons "Debug" and "close program". Debug button starts devenv in debug mode with assembly code as i do not have the pdb file for the same.
There is another machine with same configuration where the VS 2008/2010 Ultimate works fine. Even reinstalling Win 7 did not solve the problem. Any idea why it is happening?
Try with some standard VS troubleshooting steps:
Clean the solution
Delete / rename all files in your solution created by VS, i.e. all .ncb, .suo, .user files
Launch Visual Studio with all add-ins disabled: devenv.exe /SafeMode
Reset All Settings: Tools -> Import / Export Settings -> Reset All Settings
Delete HKCU:\Software\Micosoft\VisualStudio\9.0 and then restart Visual Studio
Repair the Visual Studio installation through Add/Remove Programs
Recently I had the same problem, there is not much help on the Internet. So I thought this could be an easy fix. I re-install Visual Studio Several times but no luck. Finally, I uninstall .NET Framework along with Visual Studio, re-boot and re-install.
It worked fine !!
I thought it might help someone.
VS 2012 Stopped Working
I couldn't open a project or create a new one without it crashing
I was getting this error...
System.ComponentModel.Composition.ImportCardinalityMismatchException was unhandled
Message=No exports were found that match the constraint:
ContractName Microsoft.VisualStudio.Language.Intellisense.IGlyphService
RequiredTypeIdentity Microsoft.VisualStudio.Language.Intellisense.IGlyphService
InnerException:
However, as mentioned above this worked for me:
Launch Visual Studio with all add-ins disabled:
devenv.exe /SafeMode
Reset All Settings: Tools -> Import / Export Settings -> Reset All Settings
Hey i had the same problem some time back but was solved when i installed this patch fix.
Check it out here -
http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/Downloads/DownloadDetails.aspx?DownloadID=26662.
For me ... one of extension I installed earlier is the culprit. That extension is some sort of code reflector. That tool manage to slow down my debugging when i step forward. And make visual studio 2012 constantly crashing. So my advice is be careful what tools and extensions you install... especially those that are not created by Microsoft themselves.
In my case the crash was caused by the parallel project builds. After went to Options -> Projects and Solutions -> Build and Run and set maximum number of parallel project builds to 1, the crash was gone.
There could be multiple issues even in the code if the call to an async method an awaiter is missing.
If everything seems to correct from code-wise then clean the solution and delete all the obj and bin fill from all project. Start building the solution again.
This worked multiple times in my scenario.
In vs2005 opening a file causes a dialog to pop up "Contacting server to get a list of items to update"... everytime... I'm not checking out / editing ... just opening to view.
Reset vs2005 settings etc ... but to no avail ...
No settings appear to be diff. between mine and other devs boxes here.
Appears to be nothing on google.
No addins etc
driving me nuts - anytime something changes on the server I get the change ... not to mention the interruption.
any ideas?
This is obviously not normal behaviour as you can tell from looking at the other developers machines. I would personally suspect a plug-in of some sort. You could try looking in Tools, Add-in Manager to see if anything is there. If that doesn't work, close Visual Studio and start a Visual Studio 2005 Command Prompt and then type
devenv /SafeMode
And see if the problem still occurs. If it does you could try resetting Visual Studio by typing the following at a Visual Studo 2005 command prompt (warning it will reset all your preferences etc)
devenv /ResetSettings
But all of these are a shot in the dark - I've never seen the behaviour that you are describing...