VS.NET IDE Won't Start

I've had Visual Studio .NET Pro for a few months now, and I've always been able to run it just fine until recently. When I ran it, it displayed "The application cannot start." twice, and then closed. I searched on the web and on Microsoft, and applied the resolution found at http://support.microsoft.com/default...;en-us;Q306905 but it didn't work.

I searched some more and found that there were two .NET Framework Service Packs, so I thought I'd grab SP2 and install it, but when I ran the program it just said "This action is only valid for products that are currently installed."

So, next I sat and waited for a couple of hours for VS.NET to completely reinstall, and when it finished the IDE and the SP2 still gave me the same error messages.

I've noticed that my little Windows auto-updater has been running a lot lately too, and has installed a few updates in the past week or so. Could this have anything to do with the problem?


I'm running Visual Studio .NET Pro on Windows XP Pro.

Windows updater:

I wouldn't have thought so, Satch. Mine's updated a few over the last week too but i can still run it.

Now that you mentioned that i noticed that VS seems to take a lot longer to load projects though, i'm not talking about big projects either just small demo applications.

Anyone else noticed this?

Mine is taking quite a while to load blank projects and I have the latest 2.2ghz processor and 512mb.