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

Sorry for having to create a new post instead of commenting on the selected answer .. I do not have enough rep to comment at this time.

My issue was was temporarily resolved by the "...delete the .suo file ..." solution, and as other folks pointed out, I had to delete the file every single time.

Since it (apparently) is impossible to stop the creation of the file I started to dig a little more into what the file did. In addition to saving user settings, I believe it is also saving session settings, like which files you have open when VS is closed. I suspected that my project is attempting to open a file that no longer exists and that is what is causing the hang. What fixed things on my end was to delete the .suo, open VS, open a file within my solution, build and close the solution. After doing this I have had no hangs.

tl:dr

In my case, a user setting file(.suo) was attempting to open a file in my solution that no longer existed. I resolved the issue by performing the following steps.

1. Delete the .suo file (for me this was in /[projectfolder]/.vs/[projectname]/v14
2. Open Visual Studio
3. Open your project
4. Open a file (I simply opened a random .cs file)
5. Build and save your solution (Simply saving may do the trick, I built by habit)
6. Close Visual Studio

Hope this helps someone ... we spent way too many hours on this issue :)

Answer 2

I have fixed the issue by uninstalling these two plugins:

1. Productivity Power Tool
2. Web Essentials

Answer 3

I had similar issue, when i checked the solution file it was created by VS.Net 2012. To resolve the issue, I created dummy solution file and reloaded the projects from vs.net 2012.

Also observed when nuget package update got screwed up, while you reload the solution, Visual Studio might get hang.

The Visual Studio might go hang, when there was a problem in loading the nuget packages.

Answer 4

I just removed "packages" folder from root of solution and it helped for me (Visual Studio Express 2015)

Answer 5

Sometimes it's enough to simply delete the ".v12.suo" file and try to open the solution again. Helped me many times when VS2013 was freezing on loading a project.

Answer 6

Try to uninstall extensions with "Control Panel" or disable any add-in in [Tools]=>[Add-in Manager] then try to reopen the solution.

My problem was fixed by uninstall "Visual Localizer".