Visual Studio 2015 installer hangs during install?

Question

This was a case of one of the sub-installers getting stuck during the install and never completing. Unfortunately when this happens, it looks like the master installer never times out the operation. The trick is to open up the Task Manager in detail mode, and look for a sub-installer process that is showing 0% CPU usage and 0% disk usage, indicating it has died. Then just kill that process and the master installation will resume. In my case, the name of the sub-installer was SecondaryInstaller.exe and according to the installation log it happened while it was trying to install some Android SDK components for the cross platform development modules. It had frozen permanently. I killed it and the master installer completed. When I ran Visual Studio it was fine, although I'm guessing I'll have to do some digging on the Android components install problem.

I temporarily disabled my antivirus (AVG) and restarted the install. That fixed it.

The current version of AVG Free antivirus is incompatible with Microsoft Visual Studio 2015.

1. It does not allow Visual Studio to be installed on the computer. It gets stuck at "Creating restore point". Visual Studio installs perfectly when AVG is turned off.

2. Any code compiled in "Release" mode targeting x86 platform/environment (in project properties) does not compile. It compiles successfully when AVG is turned off.

I posted the issues in AVG support forum but no one responded.

Same thing happened to me, and I also tried to terminate secondary process from task manager. Do not do that. It is not a solution, but rather a hack which may cause issues later. In my case, I was not even able to uninstall Visual Studio. I tried both web installation and ISO, same issue.

Here is how it worked finally. I restored my Windows 7 to earliest restore point as possible, when there was nothing installed, so I was sure that there would be no conflicts between the different tools (Java, Android API, etc.)

I started the installation of Visual Studio 2015 Community Release Candidate at 10 p.m. At 7 a.m., it was working on Android API 19-21. A hour later, it was finally preparing Visual Studio.

This means that all you need to do is to actually wait 8 to 9 hours. Don't terminate the secondary installer at risk of breaking your Visual Studio; just wait.

During the installation if you think it has hung (notably during the "Android SDK Setup"), browse to your %temp% directory and order by "Date modified" (descending), there should be a bunch of log files created by the installer.

The one for the "Android SDK Setup" will be named "AndroidSDK_SI.log" (or similar).

Open the file and got to the end of it (Ctrl+End), this should indicate the progress of the current file that is being downloaded.

i.e: "(80%, 349 KiB/s, 99 seconds left)"

Reopening the file, again going to the end, you should see further indication that the download has progressed (or you could just track the modified timestamp of the file [in minutes]).

i.e: "(99%, 351 KiB/s, 1 seconds left)"

Unfortunately, the installer doesn't indicate this progress (it's running in a separate "Java.exe" process, used by the Android SDK).

This seems like a rather long-winded way to check what's happening but does give an indication that the installer hasn't hung and is doing something, albeit very slowly.

I had the same problem when I tried to install VS 2015 RC from ISO. It got stuck during Android SDK Setup (API Level 19 & 21, System Images). For me the problem was metered Wi-Fi connection. The installer didn't download necessary files.

Turning off the Internet connection resolved the problem. When installation finished, it said that some components were not installed and it will try to download and install them later.

Check if your Windows has pending updates. After the restart, installation worked as expected.