Visual Studio 2015 does not start

Question

We have installed Visual Studio 2015 Professional on Windows 7. It was working fine. But after we installed updates from the menu Tools-->'Extensions and Updates' today the Visual studio does not start anymore. we tried using 'run as administrator' as well. From the Start menu we right click on 'Visual Studio 2015', then 'run as administrator', the usual dialog box asking for permissions appears, we click on 'Yes', splash screen for Visual Studio appears for a second and then disappears. On the Task Manager, it does not appear as well.

Re-starting the system does not help either. .NET 4.6 is installed and Visual Studio 2012 on the same system is working fine.

UPDATE 1 The issue started after we installed the last update (from within VS2015) that had something to do with universal apps I think.

UPDATE 2 At the exact time when I start VS2015, one Windows Event log gets generated under security section as follows:

EventID 6281 Microsoft-Windows-Security-Auditing Audit Failure Message: Code Integrity determined that the page hashes of an image file are not valid. The file could be improperly signed without page hashes or corrupt due to unauthorized modification. The invalid hashes could indicate a potential disk device error. File Name: \Device\HarddiskVolume3\Windows\System32\l3codeca.acm 

Answer 1

Here's what worked for me. Go to the Command Prompt and navigate to the folder with devenv.exe

In my case it was C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\Common7\IDE

then execute

Devenv.exe /ResetSettings

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms241273.aspx

Answer 2

I had the same problem recently after I upgraded one of the packages. I tried "everything" and the only option that worked was the /Setup switch (I was logged in as Administrator, but don't think that's required).

c:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\Common7\IDE>devenv.exe /Setup c:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\Common7\IDE>devenv.exe 

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ex6a2fad.aspx