This morning my Box had slowed down quite a bit and I decided to clean it up. Basically, I hopped to Add / Remove Programs screen and started picking the stuff I didn't need. Of the list of Items I removed were:

  • Azerus - a bulky Bit Torrent Client (which I had not replaced with BitLord).
  • Adobe Photo Album - that abode had just fooled me into installing when I installed Acrobat reader.
  • Windows Work Flow Foundation - this was an early Beta Release that I had downloaded to play around with but wasn't using anyways - so I decided to delete this.

Having done this I decided to start working. I start my Visual Studio 2005 - the splash screen comes up and Bang!! Crash!

"Microsoft Visual Studio has encountered a problem and needs to close."

The problem was strikingly similar to http://weblogs.asp.net/kencox/archive/2005/04/17/402275.aspx but the only difference being Ken (the person who posted the above message) was working on a Beta Release and I was on RTM.

Turns, out - the only other piece of information avilable in the “detailed report” that was being sent to Microsoft was: Faulting application devenv.exe and faulting module kernel32.dll and of course a whole ton of memory addresses I understand nothing about.

Hmmm. I start thinking and putting to practise what is often reffered to as “Debugging by co-incidence” - After a couple of hours of investigating I discover another item in my Add / Remove Program List which is “Windows Work Flow Foundation Extentions For Visual Studio” (or something like that). My guess was I removed work flow foundation and didn't remove the extentions so Visual Studio.NET doesn't know what to do and crashes!

So, If I remove this as well that might fix the problem. I do. Bingo! I start my Visual Studio 2005 instance and it works just fine!

Now - Here are a few questions:

  1. Is there any blessed way by which I could have read that “detailed report” and understood what the problem was? (I'll honestly appreciate it a LOT if someone can point me in the direction of what those reports are and what they mean?)
  2. Shouldn't this be considered a bug in Visual Studio IDE - the entire IDE crashing becuase an extention (that I didn't need any ways) wasn't found!?
  3. In this whole process I removed Visual Studio.NET 2005 Premium Partner edition from my box. I remeber installing the professional version but don't recall installing Premium Partner edition - Can anyone tell me what the heck I removed and how is that going to effect me?

More than anything else experiences like these just help us realize the kind of dependency hell we're creating for ourselves where it becomes impossible to find out uninstalling which completely unrelated application you dont need might just screw up your box and leave you at the mercy of good luck to get back. Maybe that's something we'll all have to live with but for now I'll be really really happy and thankfull if anyone can provide answers to my 3 questions.