Pages

Wednesday, December 4, 2013

[Fix] Visual Studio 2008 crashes every time I change the layout and exit

microsoftvisualstudio4

You must be wondering what I'm doing with Visual Studio 2008. Unfortunately, that's what we are using for developing the printer driver at work. Soon I think we will be upgrading it straight to version 2013 but I have no idea how soon that would be.

Anyways, I had been predominantly using Windows 8 on my work PC but it seemed to act a bit strangely in the last few days so I switched to Windows 7. For some reason, Visual Studio would crash if I changed the layout of the different panes and exit it. The layout that had been saved some time ago was not optimal, so I desperately needed to change the layout.

vstfsBuildBuild844-Microsoft-Visual-Studio-Administrator_2011-03-22_14-07-30

The first thing that I tried was to delete VS2008 folder in Documents folder. That folder seemed to contain the user specific. I didn’t check whether the issue persisted across other user accounts though. But deleting that folder didn't fix the problem.

The next solution was to reinstall VS2008. Since I had SP1 installed on top of it, I thought I wouldn't be able to use repair. With some hesitation, I launched the uninstaller from the control panel. Still it asked me whether I wanted to repair it. Even though common sense made me believe that it wouldn't work, I just gave it a shot. Miraculously, it went through just fine and finished successfully.

Before installing SP1, I tested if repairing made the problem go away. And it had!!! I was feeling relieved. Then I installed SP1 and set VS2008 to use WinSDK version 7.1 (instead of the inbuilt libraries) which had been installed a long time ago and was untouched.

It’s a shame that I don't really know what caused the crashes. But I’m glad that I could fix it without needing pull my hair out. I had other things to attend to while the PC was busy repairing VS and updating SP1, so I didn’t have to watch though the slow repairing and installation of SP1. 

No comments:

Post a Comment

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...