Visual Studio 2013 hangs when opening a solution

Question

I installed VS2013 (v12.0.21005.1) and added ReSharper 8 (v8.0.2000.2660) a day or two ago. That day it was fine. Now I'm lucky if I can get it to open one solution in a whole day. It opens OK by itself, but when I try and open a solution from within - via the menu - it hangs, badly. If I right-click a solution in Windows Explorer and 'open with VS 2013', it opens then hangs, in exactly the same way. Every now and again, for hours, I get a little notice that it's busy with something.

Anyone know what could be wrong, before I endure a reinstall that doesn't fix the problem?

Answer 1

I get this issue now and again - VS 2013 Update 2, Win 8.1, IE 11.

Try this - Open task manger, kill the VS app hanging, and then close any IE sessions that are running in the Background Process list - there may be one or more hanging around.

Restart VS

Seems to clear it for me, without a reboot.

Answer 2

VS2012 hangs on me e.g. when opening a csproj file on a network share (in fact on a share that was on the VirtualBox host, connected as a smb share using a VirtualBox feature).

Copying the project over to a local drive fixed it for me. Not sure if assigning a drive letter would do the trick.

Also not sure why it does not work via network share, if it is a VS limitation or perhaps some plugin (I use resharper, of course).

Answer 3

Deleting Test Results from my TestResults folder actually did the trick for me. Just another thing to try.

Answer 4

Check for Windows updates

I had this problem too. Furthermore, I couldn't open my Windows firewall settings (trying to block VS's internet connection).

When opening update settings (Windows 8), I saw there was a pending update ("found today"), so I rebooted my computer, letting Windows update. After that, VS and the firewall worked fine again.

Check your hardware

I've had the problem a second time; even Windows 8's update page would keep loading forever. It was an issue with my (non-OS) hard drive: https://superuser.com/questions/756261/various-parts-of-windows-8-and-visual-studio-2013-get-blocked-by-possibly-comm?noredirect=1#comment978074_756261

Answer 5

The problem I had was the Perforce connection.

When opening the solution, it would ask if I wanted it to connect to Perforce. Allowing it to try would make it hang and allocate 1.5 GB of RAM.

Not allowing the P4 connection let it load properly (allocating 1 GB RAM). Then I could tell it to connect to P4 after, and it is now fine.

Answer 6

Basically it could be anything, but you can try a few things:

1. Turning it off and on again.
2. Clear the ReSharper cache, it's in %LOCALAPPDATA%\JetBrains\ReSharper\<CurrentVersion>\SolutionCaches, where you should find a folder matching the solution you are trying to open. Just close all instances of VS2013, delete the folder and try again.
3. turn off ReSharper: Tools > Options > ReSharper > General > Suspend
4. uninstall ReSharper completely and see if problems persists.
5. Repair Visual Studio through Programs and Features.