Visual Studio 2012 won't start

Question

I installed VS2012 Premium from our MSDN subscription and it was working fine the first couple of days but then I installed a few extensions I can't now start VS2012 and it gives the error:

Faulting application name: devenv.exe, version: 11.0.50727.1, time stamp: 0x5011ecaa Faulting module name: ntdll.dll, version: 6.1.7601.17725, time stamp: 0x4ec49b8f Exception code: 0xc0000374 Fault offset: 0x000ce6c3 Faulting process id: 0xee8 Faulting application start time: 0x01cd89bb777fc1dd Faulting application path: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe Faulting module path: C:\Windows\SysWOW64\ntdll.dll 

I'm running it on Windows 7 64 bit.

I've tried to repair, uninstall and install again and nothing. I tried to restore to a previous restore system point but nothing.

The extensions I installed I can remember:

• VS10x Code Map
• VSCommands
• Visual SVN
• Nuget manager

(all the above my colleagues have it too and it works fine for them) and:

• Web Essentials
• Visual Studio Color Theme Editor
• SlowCheetah
• Mobile Ready HTML5

Questions are:

1. Anyone else has had this problem?
2. Is there a way I can uninstall extensions from a command line or software? (I removed the extensions folder but that doesn't do anything)
3. Can I repair the "C:\Windows\SysWOW64\ntdll.dll"? Is it really a problem with this dll?

I haven't been able to find any similar issue in other versions and because VS2012 is new doesn't seem to be much information either.

Answer 1

It is working now!. This is what I did:

Following the suggestion here:

1. Removed the key: [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\Layers]. VS2012 loading but then crashing before I could do anything else (error in C:\Windows\syswow64\KERNELBASE.dll)
2. Then I removed:
   • [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\11.0]
   • [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\11.0_Config] and started again and is working fine.

I obviously lost all my settings but no big deal as I can now do some work! :)

Answer 2

Running devenv.exe with the /SafeMode argument would probably have also fixed it.