'exception has been thrown by a target of invocation' when starting up Visual Studio 2010

Question

When I start up Visual Studio 2010 I often get the error 'exception has been thrown by a target of invocation' which prevents me from opening Visual Studio. A reboot of my computer makes the error go away, but a few days later it returns.

What causes this error and how can I get rid of it?

I've found a lot of questions on SO that mention this error when running their code in Visual Studio, but none when opening Visual Studio.

Answer 1

It seems the problem was that my system path became too long for Windows to handle: it was 2087 characters long (hat tip to this article).