My Visual Studio 2005 installation cannot get past the "splash screen".
Perhaps three weeks ago I had a working Visual Studio 2005 installation. This machine has Visual Studio 2003 also installed, side-by-side, and I needed to do some work with 2003 which was and still is working fine. Last Friday I launched Visual Studio 2005 and it hung at the splash screen.
I'm now "dead in the water" with my 2005 work environment and have a work stoppage because of it, which I've been trying to resolve for 3 days.
I've tried:
- - repairing 2005 installation. says it succeeded, but 2005 still hangs
- - installing 2005 SP 1. says it was successful, but 2005 still hangs
- - uninstalling the SlickEdit "Gadgets" that I was going to explore; still hangs
- - uninstalling a .Net based application that I recently installed (thought maybe there was an interoperability problem that impacted 2005); still hangs
- - rolled back the machine using "System Restore" to a previous restore point (I had been updating a lot of different software during the past couple of weeks); still hangs
- - tried ensuring jscript.dll and vbscript were properly registered (due to another forum post); still hangs
- - made sure I'm not using something called "ankh" anywhere (which seems to hang VS 2005 according to another forum post); doesn't appear that I have any contact with it.
What I see in the process list is that devenv.exe appears to be doing nothing at all. It's sitting there with 0% CPU, and nothing else changing --- I/O reads, memory, page faults, etc. are all sitting there in a dead stop.
I thought perhaps devenv is waiting for a very expensive operation to complete, (maybe I am too impatient), so I let it sit for several hours, came back and it was still hung.
If you've encountered this problem and know of a possible solution, I'd be grateful for the tip!
Visual Studio 2005 hangs during launch - won't get past splash screen. Yipes-"help!"
Jeff Williams
Gabriel,
your tip was exactly what I needed. I've discovered the add-in that was failing, removed it, and the IDE no longer hangs during launch.
Unfortunately for me, the IDE launches but now crashes when I try to open an existing project or create a new project. I doubt that this new problem is directly due to removal of the add-in ---- my guess is that I inadvertently scrambled something else about the state of the installation while I was thrashing around trying to deal with the hang-on-launch problem.
Whatever is now damaged about the installation is bad enough that I cannot run the installer to do a "repair." I also discovered that SP1 won't install as an "upgrade."
I figured that my best bet would be to just un-install VS 2005 completely and then re-install a fresh installation and basically "start over" without the offending add-in, now that I know what the offending add-in was and know how to remove it without thrashing around.
The un-install won't run either. It appears that my thrasing around (possibly with System Restore points) left something in a bad-enough state that install actions won't work and I'm stranded with a dead IDE that won't even uninstall.
The uninstaller displays the VS 2005 setup UI, and then after a few moments reports:
I am reminded of how very unhelpful it can be to have an UNinstall fail. I'll be scanning the rest of the posts here to see if I can get some clues about how to deal with a damaged installation that won't uninstall. :(
Bule
if you're willing to uninstall and reinstall, try using this tool:
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/ LinkID=55128
Note- it will remove everything VS 2005 installed for you.
LuckyL
If step 1 solves it this means that some package is causing this. The ActivityLog.xml will show you which one. See for more info about the logging:
http://pointerx.net/blogs/glozano/archive/2007/01/25/How-to_3A00_-Enable-Visual-Studio-2005-logging.aspx
Neotech
I tried everything recommended here including the complete uninstall/reinstall and STILL got nothing after the splash screen. The I saw that the extensions for WCF, WPF and WWF were still present in the control panel's Add/Remove list, so I uninstalled those.
THAT finally did it. VS loaded, and I was able to successfully create a project (SSIS) and exit nromally.
Whew!
This sure makes me plan to wait on Vista...
Lisa Morgan
arcliner
Gabriel, This seemed to help put me back on the trail: Visual Studio launched immediately with the left-shift. I'm moving on to logging as my next step... Thanks!
fettoter