How to stop right click dead-locking Visual Studio 2008

Question

I have a very serious problem with Visual Studio 2008. Occasionally when I right-click (for go to definition, set next statement etc) when I'm debugging, Visual Studio will just dead-lock and go into not responding mode.

Has anyone had the same problem? Does anyone know how to solve it?

Edit: I'm using SP1 with a couple of hot-fixes.

Answer 1

Problem:
Signed Applications/dlls load slowly in Vista. Visual Studio IDE 'Hangs' on offline/non-internet-connected workstations. Without internet connectivity the certificate revocation check times out and causes applications to hang. When debugging/stepping through code dlls are loaded as needed and this is when the revocation check is attempted and the VS IDE becomes unresponsive.

What this effects:
This effects all signed applications/dlls and is also the reason for Microsoft Word/Excel taking so long to open a simple document. Office applications, SQL Management Studio, Visual Studio, Web Applications that use a certificate.

Fix:
Disable checking of Publisher's Certificate Revocation

Via IE:

1. Go to Internet Options in IE 7
2. Then go to the Security Tab, scroll towards the bottom
3. Uncheck the 'Check for Publisher's Certificate Revocation' checkbox
4. Click OK

Via the registry:

1. Open regedit
2. Browse to the following key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WinTrust\Trust Providers\Software Publishing
   
3. To disable the check: Change the value of the State key to 146944 Decimal or 0x00023e00 Hexadecimal
   To re-enable the check: Change the value of the State key to 146432 Decimal or 0x00023c00 Hexadecimal
   

Alternate Fix:
Disable the Visual Studio Hosting Process:

1. Open a project in Visual Studio.
2. On the Project menu, click Properties.
3. Click the Debug tab.
4. Clear the Enable the Visual Studio hosting process check box.

Note: The Alternate Fix causes the loss of some debugging functionality.

Background:
Microsoft Connect Report

Answer 2

This issue no longer occurs for me since I've moved to Windows7. If you're unfortunate to be stuck with Windows Vista still, I did discover that it only hung on right-click when waiting for the intellisense database to be built (see the bottom left corner for it's progress). The only "fix" I had was to wait for intellisense to stop building, then do a right-click.

Answer 3

I wrote a piece of code the other day, a very crazy template, and the latest VisualStudio would just hang if I placed my mouse over the templated code. It was surreal :)

Anyways you might have an issue like that and you might want to delete your intellisense database and try again.

Answer 4

Try launching Visual Studio in safe mode to rule out problems with any extension installed.