Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 has stopped working

Question

I have been using Visual Studio 2012 on Winodws Server 2008 R2 sp1, Although apart from a bit slow performance it seem to work fine. But whenever I close the application, I get following error-

 Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 has stopped working

And prompts to restart or debug the program.

I read here that deleting following registry key, would fix the issue on 64 Bit machine.

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\Layers]

The issue is, I have not be able to locate the registry key beyond this path, on my machine. HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wow6432Node\Microsoft

Have you come across this situation earlier, what is the workaround for this.

Thank you for your help !

Answer 1

I noticed that other community members have the same error message as yours, and they are resolved the issue by deleting the following key in the Registry:

32-bit machine:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\Layers]
 "C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\\Common7\\IDE\\devenv.exe"=""

64-bit machine:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\Layers]

See this case for further information: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vssetup/thread/d848776a-b00f-4311-ab09-3a8777462968 Thanks.