Visual Studio is stealing focus - windows

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. :'-(

Related

Visual studio 2019 crash while attach kernel debugging

Trying to attach the kernel through VS2019, and when I break, the VS (devenv.exe) suddenly crashed.
It was a nasty bug!
I tried to replace the WDK/SDK, reinstall the VS extension, and reinstall the VS (2022 isn't supporting kernel-debug yet), but nothing helped.
I knew the reason was heap corruption, I had bet the extension, but the real reason was the visual studio window layout. Since I'm syncing my layout with my MS account, it automatically applied, and some window within it cause the crash.
This is a sharing for the very few people that could encounter the same issue.

Visual Studio 2010 (devenv) Hung Process After Closing

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.

Starting Visual Studio causes all running apps to hang and stop responding

After my laptop fell on the floor and its screen was a little damaged, I was able to continue working with it, but failed to build a project of mine. At some point, the system froze, and I was forced to restart the laptop. Ever since, I’m not able to start Visual Studio 2008 or 2010. Moreover, when I do try to start one of the versions, I see no splash screen, and at some point, all running applications stop responding, and I’m forced to restart the laptop.
When I started Visual Studio 2008 with the /SafeMode flag it started OK and worked perfectly, but when I tried it with Visual Studio 2010, I did see a splash screen and the application main window was opened, but then the system got stuck again and forced me to restart.
I use Windows XP SP3, and the addins I recall I have are Visual Assist, IncrediBuild, and Productivity Power Tools for VS 2010 (how can I check what other addins are installed without having Visual Studio running?)
I tried using the /Log flag to find out what’s happening, but there was nothing that seemed related in the generated log.
At the time of the hang, the CPU and memory of the system was low.
The problem happens whether I open Visual Studio with no solution, or with an existing solution.
Do you have any idea why this might happen, or how it can be solved?
Edit:
I run chkdsk /R /V and it is stuck on "1 percent
completed." for hours now. Is there anything I can do?
I'll try to re-install Visual Studio 2010 next week, when I'm in the office. I hope that will help.
Thanks a lot,
splintor
Your drive is torched. Buy a new drive, and salvage whatever you can from the existing drive, then swap them out. If you're lucky you can salvage enough of the existing drive to not need to do a full OS reinstall, but it's likely you're going to need to do some reinstallation.
Looks like the cause if the fall of your laptop. Though what changes happened is unknown it is more likely to be a hardware issue.
Did you reinstall the softwares and check how they work.
If I was diagnosing this issue, I would start from the ground up.
Start of with a basic CheckDisc - CheckDisk Instructions for XP
Progress from that to try re-installing over your existing VS install.
I can't see it being a software problem, so I reckon the checkdisk will discover/fix something, or a reinstall should resolve it.
Dave
You've probably damaged your hard disk in an area which is touched by VS. Windows often grinds completely to a halt when it's struggling to read a damaged area of disk.
Check the Windows event log for errors to do with disk drives.

Debugging in visual studio 2008 freezes entire system

Any time i try to debug in visual studio 2008 my entire system will freeze whenever a breakpoint is hit.
I can move the mouse around and that remains responsive but nothing i click on does anything,
I can bring up the task manager but can't do anything with it and i am able to lock/unlock the machine.
I tried a fix that i found via google that suggested i disable advanced text services but it didn't work. I am using visual studio 2008 with SP1 running on Windows XP Pro, asking here is my last hope before formating/reinstalling so i hope someone can help me out.
I debug by running the application in debug mode, the freeze happens no matter what the project size and it seems as if it is just the entire GUI that freezes, the computer carries on working just fine i just can't do anything with it because the GUI is totaly unresponsive.
I found I only had this issue when I was using the keyboard to debug. If I used the toolbar debug buttons, I didn't have an issue.
To "fix" this, I set the LowLevelHooksTimeout to 300ms (from 5000ms). You may need to add the DWORD if it isn't already there.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Control Panel\Desktop\LowLevelHooksTimeout
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\LowLevelHooksTimeout
Restart after making this change for good measure.
How big is the project you are running? When I did a Find last night on a huge open source project, I got kind of the same behavior.
Also, did you try Uninstalling just VS2008, then Reinstalling with only the options you use.
Have you tried disabling "Call ToString()" debugger option? This is ON by default, and is known to deadlock.

Breakpoints not working in Visual Studio 2008

When I hit F5, my VS 2008 opens my site in IE and halts. There is no sign in VS that the project is running. It enables the RUN button again even though the site is opened in IE. Hence, my breakpoints are also not working.
This behaviour started happening suddenly..
Any reasons why it happens and resolutions?
Are you building in Debug mode? Release builds don't support breakpoints...
One reason I have personally experienced:
Problem:
Running two separate Solutions in their own instance of Visual Studio 2008
Solution:
I closed both instances of VS, then started only one.
Conclusion 1:
Visual Studio might have a problem when RAM is limited and silently disable breakpoints (fail)
Conclusion 2:
Visual Studio might share some critical resources needed for breakpointing which the first instance holds onto and (again silently) the other instance won't even give you an error.
Lots of bugs and fail in Visual Studio.
This is a bit late, but in case anyone else has this problem, I'll post these two links that helped me when I had a similar problem:
Forum describing similar problems: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vsdebug/thread/f3fcb4fb-8a08-4fa0-8d58-9ed6f3eb1193
Solution listed in the forum was this patch: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/KB957912/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=1796

Resources