Error HRESULT E_FAIL has been returned from a call

Question

I have a problem debugging a project migrated from Visual Studio 2010 to 2012. Every time I go to debug it I get the error message:

"Error HRESULT E_FAIL has been returned from a call to a COM component".

Compiling and running the application in a local IIS server works fine - just cannot debug.

The other change other than moving to VS2012 is I am now using Team Foundation Server for source control and issue tracking - but I cannot see how that would affect it.

I can narrow it down to the following

• The project file - it has been migrated from VS 2003 as a website project and has been chopped and changed up the different versions
• Crystal Report runtime library/ some other library

Anyone with any ideas?

Answer 1

I had this problem because I tried to open the SSIS Projects and test Attunity Driver for Oracle from SSDT 2013 (TFS) in SSDT 2017. In a new SSIS Project would the Attunity Driver work fine but in upgraded SSIS Project it would show the error when i try to test connection. The solution is to fix the old Project.

Answer 2

I had the same issue after an upgrade from VS2013 to VS2015.

The project I was working at referenced itself. While VS2013 didn't care, VS2015 didn't like that and I got that error. After deleting the reference, the error was gone. It took me around 4 hours to find that out...

Answer 3

I wanted to add that I encountered this error when opening designer file in WinForms app. My issue was that one of the references in the project was referencing itself. Apparently this can happen as mentioned here

https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/office/en-US/00aede04-d8cd-4475-8114-4b4792261052/winforms-designer-error-hresult-efail-has-been-returned-from-a-call-to-a-com-component

I removed the reference and it is working fine.

Answer 4

I recently spent about 3 hours trying to fix this issue on my ASP.NET app running on local IIS. I had 'Override application root URL' specified and I specified the url with an ending forward slash (/) such as http://my.dev.com/. If I saved the project options and came back in it would show the overrided root url as http://http://my.dev.com. Once I removed the last forward slash it started to behave ok and the error went away.

Answer 5

I faced the same issue in Visual Studio 2017, Do follow these steps:

1. Start —> Run —> regsvr32 %SystemRoot%\System32\msxml3.dll

2. Start —> Run —> regsvr32 %SystemRoot%\SysWOW64\msxml3.dll

3. Clean the Project.

4. Restart visual studio.

   Step 1 and 2 were copied from Besnik Kastrati post.

Answer 6

HRESULT E_FAIL has been returned from a call to a COM component

In my case, it was because i had differents projects with same GUID in my solution. (Project was created by copy/paste)