A recent Microsoft update crashes VS 11.5+?

Riv · Post by **Riv** » Wed Aug 19, 2009 8:20 pm

Just in case somebody else experiences this same thing.

To cut a long story short: It seems that either a recent Microsoft Live Messenger update or a recent Windows update caused my VS 11.5+ to open but then immediately go to a complete halt. Going back to a Windows restore point from last weekend helped and things seem to work again.

Then a sligthly longer version:
The last I worked with VS was on Sunday. Things worked. Today (Wednesday) I could open my VS 11.5+ and see the normal view where you would normally start working. Then nothing. I couldn't select, highlight or click any item in the window. The system just didn't react to any of my actions while the mouse pointer was on top of the VS window. The only way out was to kill VS through Task Manager. The same thing when trying to directly open a VSP file from a folder: the project loaded ok, but I couldn't do anything with it and had to kill VS. Interestingly, afer opening up, CPU usage of the vs process was 0%, so it wasn't really doing anything. It just stood still without reacting to anything.

This was repeatable, and restarting the computer didn't help in any way.

Between now and Sunday I might have installed some Windows updates (though don't remember for sure). More importantly, I tried to update my Microsoft Live Messenger, which turned out to be a pretty big update and which apparently failed somehow as Messenger tended to get to a similar halt.

All other programs I tried worked (Outlook, Chrome and IE Explorer, Word...).

Then I just restored to a Windows restore point from Sunday, and now everything seems to be fine again. Would be kind of nice to know what it was that caused this, but if things keep working ok, I probably won't get any deeper in this.

Rgds,
Riv

Black Lab · Post by **Black Lab** » Wed Aug 19, 2009 8:41 pm

Would be kind of nice to know what it was that caused this, but if things keep working ok, I probably won't get any deeper in this.

My motto when editing video, and using VS in particular, is "it's faster and easier to find a workaround than it is to find and solve the problem".

sjj1805 · Post by **sjj1805** » Thu Aug 20, 2009 12:29 am

Forever toying around with my various machines, current tally is 5 physical computers but increase that to about 20 when you include dual booting and virtual machines.

I have found that when a Microsoft update seems to cause a problem like those mentioned above, after system restore to get it working again, more often than not the fault does not repeat itself when you re-apply the updates.
It is as though there was a corrupt download.

It is safe to try because you know you have a working restore point.
Obviously you need to check as soon as possible after reapplying the updates to make sure that your restore point does not drop off the end of the "conveyor belt."

Every time you create a new restore point, the oldest one gets deleted.