I’ve been having a weird problem for weeks, if not months, with Visual Studio .NET, my main development environment.
VS.NET crashed every time I tried to open a file from the IDE.
This is more than a minor nuisance, since there are times you HAVE to open a dialog window; for example, if you want to add an unregistered reference to a project. It had become such a vexation that I was ready – more than ready – to replace my PC.
I’ve been searching for an answer to this for a while, but couldn’t find any Usenet posts or answers in MSDN.
It finally occurred to me (duuuh) to look at Event Viewer. There was an issue with an early version of mso.dll, the Microsoft Office .dll.
I saw in the Registry that Studio uses this old version – why, I don’t know.
I renamed the file, reinstalled it from the VS Library disk, and sure enough, the problem has gone away. Knock on wood.
I’d also been having a lot of system crashes due to an unidentified driver, but no real clue about which one.
I finally figured out that it was the fax driver for my HP Office Jet. After a false start, I finally uninstalled the whole thing, and my PC seems more stable.
Knock on wood, again.