Visual Studio 2010 RTM crashes on startup with "Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation"

Question

On startup Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 RTM Ultimate displays the splash screen then crashes with "Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation". See original MSDN forum post

This is what I have tried so far on my Win7 64x machine:

• VS Repair

• VS Reinstall

• System restore to before issue

• Modifying "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0\General" UILanguage value to 0x409(1033)

• Modifying the environment variable WINDIR from %SystemRoot% to C:\WINDOWS

• Deleting the key WINDIR REG_SZ in HKEY\LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Environment then recreating as WINDIR REG_EXPAND_SZ C:\WINDIR

• /reset /resetsettings /resetuserdata /safemode

Yet to my dismay, the issue still persists, any other ideas?

-Additional info- The issue arose after a windows update: -Update for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Tools for Office Runtime Redistributable x64 (KB982305) -Update for Windows 7 for x64-based Systems (KB976422)

Answer 1

There is a work around for this for temporary relief. Try restarting explorer.exe

Open task manager

• Process tab -> find explorer.exe
• Do end Process
• Go to Applications tab -> New Task... -> type explorer.exe
• Wait til Task Bar become visible.

Now start VS. I hope you won't get any error.

Answer 2

A colleague of mine had this issue on Win7 x64 recently. He was able to fix it by uninstalling VS 2010, uninstalling all versions of .net framework, and deleting the folders they had resided in. Then he installed VS2010 again. He also reinstalled the VS2010 power tools as well. After doing these he was able to open VS 2010 again. Unfortunately he did all of the above before retrying VS2010, so we're not sure which of the above steps actually fixed it. But they're worth trying before reinstalling Windows. He originally encountered the issue after he had run chkdsk in the morning. Good luck!!