"microsoft visual studio preparation" extremely slow

Question

While updating or uninstalling Visual Studio Installer Projects Extension Preview the step "Microsoft Visual Studio Preparation" is taking enormous amount of time. I may say it gets stuck.

My suspicion is the installer (Windows one, not the extension itself, since it is getting modified--updated or uninstalled) is making changes to the registry.

VS registry entries are too many to investigate them one by one. Re-installing VS is not an option. (I have VS 2013 Ultimate on Windows 8.1.)

So, my question is: is there any tool to repair, optimize, clean, or otherwise modify registry (VS portions only) to get the process quicker? Or some sensitive keys that need to be explored? Seems like there are timeouts involved? (Although I do not find this quite reasonable...)

Or, if I am wrong about the registry, Is there another reason for this symptomatic behaviour? UAC issues? NTFS security? Other?

Any advice?

Thanks.

Answer 1

I just solved a similar issue with installing Visual Studio 2013 Update 3. It was taking over an hour on the "Microsoft Visual Studio Preparation" step.

I fired up Process Monitor from Sysinternals and realised the installer was busy logging to C:\FusionLog. Killed the update process, changed the relevant settings under HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Fusion to turn off assembly bind logging, rebooted to make sure the new settings were recognised, and voila, the "Microsoft Visual Studio Preparation" step took on the order of 10's of seconds.

I hope this helps with your problem because this was extremely frustrating for me. I wasted most of my work day on this.

Answer 2

When "Microsoft Visual Studio Preparation" is shown, the installer is running "devenv /setup" to register any packages and templates. That can take a long time. Though it's not ideal, it's not a bug; it's how Visual Studio works.