Alex Chang's WebLog

A fix for when Visual Studio .NET is slow in starting up/opening

One of our developers had been suffering from extremely slow load/start-up time with the Visual Studio .NET 2003 on his developement machine (it took more than 1 minute to get through the splash screen). He tried uninstalling and re-installing VS.NET, but the problem still persisted. So today, I set out to find a solution. After about an hour of googling and searching on the web, forums, blogs, and newsgroups (it seems that there aren't that many mentionings of this issue out there), I finally came across a posting that lead us to the fix:
http://dotnetjunkies.com/Newsgroups/microsoft.public.vsnet.ide/2004/3/29/97325.aspx

What caught my eye was that, as mentioned in this newsgroup posting, we also noticed that the slow start-up problem only occurred when the developer's workstation was connected to the network. Visual Studio.NET would load without delay when we disconnected the network cable from his machine. The newsgroup posting pointed out that this is an issue with the MRU list (Most Recently Used list). We think that our developer may have tried to access/open a solution or a project across the network some time in the past. So Visual Studio.NET must've cached the file references in its Most Recently Used list. So everytime the Visual Studio.NET launched, it may have been trying to find those files on the network (which may no longer have existed). The recommended fix was to set the number of the display items in most recently used list to 1 (1 is the minimum number, default is 4 I believe) from the Tools->Option menu to clear the MRU list.  However, after setting the MRU list to only display one item, the problem still remained! After further searching on "Visual Studio .NET MRU list", I found one of the Developer PowerToys (http://www.gotdotnet.com/team/ide/) called VSTweak.  This nifty tool has a MRU Lists Manager that allows you to clear recent files and projects.  After clearing out the MRU lists, the Visual Studio .NET launched in a heartbeat without any delay.  Woo hoo!

Hope this is of help for some developers out there.

Posted: May 04 2004, 09:18 AM by AChang | with 19 comment(s)

Comments

jledgard said:

Glad I was able to help. (I wrote the MRU piece and a bunch of VSTweak.)
# May 9, 2004 1:15 AM

Henrik said:

Thanks!!! This saved me a lot of time, was just about to format my harddrive.....

Regards
Henrik
# June 1, 2004 8:40 AM

Kristopher said:

We had a simliar problem with one of our Win2003 Server boxes using FP server extensions with VS.NET (projects taking > 5 minutes to load). The log authoring option was enabled for the site, however, the FP process did not have write access to the author.log file.

Disabling logging or granting the appropriate permissions corrected the problem.
# July 10, 2004 11:49 AM

Philippe said:

My vs 2k3 instance would take about 5 minutes to load and 5 minutes to add a simple file to my project. This was happening to accounts on the domain but not local accounts. The MRU trick mentioned didn't help (this list was empty). After a while, only my account and the administrator account exhibited this weird behavior. I removed myself from the vs debuggers group (in admin tools) and now it works normally.

At least vs.net 2k5 ran fine all throughout this process.
# July 23, 2004 3:35 AM

Raterus said:

Thanks, this worked great!
# August 9, 2004 4:07 PM

FocusedWolf said:

Wow can't wait to see if this works! thx m8.
# August 19, 2004 5:04 PM

TrackBack said:

^_^,Pretty Good!
# April 10, 2005 2:19 AM

at2000_zm said:

VS can load the app very slow if you have set many breakpoints. i have come across a link that provides excellent solution to this problem. it can also be used for other purpose also.

saurabhramya.googlepages.com/save%26loadbreakpointsinvisualstudio

# June 7, 2008 9:36 AM

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# December 20, 2009 5:53 PM

guetlers said:

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In addition had anyone try this:

<a href="it.n-able.com/">N-able network management software</a> ?

# June 10, 2010 11:32 PM

Padawan said:

I was having similar issues of slowness starting up VS2008. I noticed that in the registry there were several items pointing to locations in the network that were taking a long time to be resolved. Solution was to manually change in the registry those items, pointing them to somewhere in my local drive.

Check items in:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Microsoft/VisualStudio/9.0

I also went in VS to the Tools/Options menu and on the "Environment/Import and Export Settings" item changed the "Automatically save my settings to this file" to somewhere on my C: drive as well.

# September 22, 2010 5:32 AM

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# January 17, 2011 12:39 AM

Murat Eraydin said:

If none of the above helps, try enabling administrator account.

# May 9, 2011 5:46 PM

Nila Crivello said:

Very good visiting that website.

# June 29, 2011 7:00 PM

Erline Mordecai said:

Good, I found your website via digg and these articles actually helped me ~

# July 4, 2011 3:44 PM

David Homer said:

Hi,

I've had the problem but it was down to the VMware debugger, disabling this in Tools > AddIn Manager took the startup time down from 23 seconds to 6 seconds.

Result.

Thanks,

Dave

www.centrel-solutions.com

# August 31, 2011 6:32 AM
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