Visual Studio 2012 fails to load some projects and then hangs (is busy)

Question

I have a solution consisting of 4 projects and am happily editing this at work on a Windows 7 machine running VS 2012, storing my code in TFS+Git in the cloud.

However, at home after pulling down the solution I cannot get Visual Studio 2012 on my home PC to open the project files.

I get the "solution loading..." message and (load failed) on 3 out of the 4 projects.

Now the differences are at work I run Windows 7 64-bit, at home Windows 8. At work I run the 64-bit version of VS2012, at home the 32-bit.

Maybe that's enough to mess things up, maybe I've referenced something on my 64-bit instance that my home PC does not have, but other than that the machines are patched with Update 3 of VS 2012.

What can I do to discover what VS is doing? Any trace options I can switch on? I've deleted everything, pulled the solution down to no avail.

Answer 1

I had the same problem, but uninstalling NuGet didn't help. VS would hang with (initializing...) next to one project and I'd have to kill it. Your solution got me thinking, so I removed packages folder from the solution folder. I started VS, made sure automatic download is checked in NuGet options, and then loaded the solution with no issues. Rebuilding the solution prompted NuGet to restore packages, and all was well again.