Visual Studio Hangs on Loading UI Library

Question

I'm stumped and I'm considering formatting my hard disk and starting fresh. I thought I'd try this as a last-ditch effort. When I open Visual Studio 2012 (not a solution, just VS itself), it usually hangs for minutes. This past time (see XML below) it hung for about 13 minutes.

Below is the snippet from ActivityLog.xml when starting VS with the /log switch. I don't know what to make of this data. Much googling has shown others with similar, but not identical problems. If you notice the timestamps below, you'll see that the problem centers around "Loading UI library." Any idea what this actually means or how to fix it?

Note: VsLogUI.dll does not exist in the folder shown, so I'm not sure why it's trying to access it. That file doesn't exist on my other laptop either. And the path has two slashes in it, and it's looking in a folder called IDE*. Just seems all messed-up.

  <entry>
    <record>1054</record>
    <time>2012/12/08 20:30:30.175</time>
    <type>Information</type>
    <source>VisualStudio</source>
    <description>End package load [Visual Studio Logging Package]</description>
    <guid>{2DC9DAA9-7F2D-11D2-9BFC-00C04F9901D1}</guid>
  </entry>
  <entry>
    <record>1055</record>
    <time>2012/12/08 20:33:51.723</time>
    <type>Information</type>
    <source>VisualStudio</source>
    <description>Loading UI library</description>
    <guid>{2DC9DAA9-7F2D-11D2-9BFC-00C04F9901D1}</guid>
    <path>C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\\Common7\IDE*\VsLogUI.dll</path>
  </entry>
  <entry>
    <record>1056</record>
    <time>2012/12/08 20:42:28.350</time>
    <type>Information</type>
    <source>VisualStudio</source>
    <description>Entering function CVsPackageInfo::HrInstantiatePackage</description>
    <guid>{F384B236-B4A9-401B-BC58-3106E3ACA3EC}</guid>
  </entry>

EDIT - I had this as an answer, below, but it didn't work. It worked for a few starts of VS, but after installing some extensions, the delay happened again. I'm stuck.

While I don't know why this happened, I appear to have found a work-around. After creating a text file, and renaming it to VsLogUI.dll, VS 2012 started opening quickly. Apparently that file just needed to exist. I put it here:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\Common7\IDE\

I'm betting that this work-around will work as well, although I'm a bit afraid to try it because it's changing the registry. I guess I could back up the registry first. Anyway, this appears in the registry:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\MSDN\8.0\Packages{2DC9DAA9-7F2D-11d2-9BFC-00C04F9901D1}

It has a subfolder called SatelliteDll. That has a property called DllName, with a value of VsLogUI.dll. I bet if I delete that registry entry, the problem would go away.

Answer 1

This issue occured to me when my Fusion Log folder to much data in it (~5 GB). Check to see if Fusion Log is enabled by looking in the registry here:

HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Fusion\ForceLog

This key tells you where it's loggin the data to:

HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Fusion\LogPath

Dump the contents and hopefully your load speed resumes to normal.