For about a year now I've encountered a periodic issue where VS 2008 will immediately lockup or hang after I hit F5 to run a project.  

I've found lots of answers to this problem, none of which have actually solved my problem:

  • fixing bad references to old versions of a dll
  • disabling javascript debugging in IE
  • setting firefox as the default browser
  • completely rebuilding my solution
  • etc ...
I finally found a solution that did the trick.  I had two development VM's with this problem and it resolved the issue on both.

  1. open a VS dos box.
  2. execute "devenv.exe /ResetSettings"
Obviously this does exactly what it says, and resets any customizations you've made to your VS settings to the defaults, so it comes at a price.


UPDATE: 

After 2 days that fix stopped working.  Re-running "devenv.exe /resetsettings" no longer fixes the issue.  Strange. Further searching revealed a thread discussing unplugging your ethernet cable while it is locked immediatly fixes the issue.  I tried it, and it worked.  It gets stranger.  I plug it back in and try to reproduce the problem.  I can't.  Apparently yanking the RJ-45 out of the pc permanently fixed the issue???
Reading further some folks found VS08 is making DNS requests to crl.microsoft.com and adding the following line to their host file solved the problem.

127.0.0.1     crl.microsoft.com

I have no idea if that actually fixes the problem since it now works regardless.  My best guess at this point is that it only tries to hit crl.microsoft.com periodically?  Perhaps that is why my problem comes and goes. If this pops up in the near future I will try adding the line to my host file permenantly.  It also begs the question of why resetsettings temporarily fixed my problem ... or was it timing/coincidence?

It's a brutally long thread but here it is for reference.