VS 2010 Professional Only Works From Remote Desktop

Question

I have installed Visual Studio 2010 on my laptop (Win 7). Whenever I start it, it crashes immediately without giving any error.

• devenv /log has no error
• devenv /safemode crashes
• deleted %appdata%/microsoft/visualstudios/10.0/ folder and started visual studio again but still no use
• Re-installed visual studio a couple of times
• Re-installed the .NET framework 4, 4.5 and 4 Multi-targeting pack
• Rebooted machine after every step :)
• Has older visual studio 2005 which works just fine. (yeah, 2005!)

From Remote desktop and On Screenshare

• When I connect to my laptop from some other machine using remote desktop it starts working and on disconnect it crashes immediately
• When I start it in screenshare (some windows client, not sure which client) it starts and crashes immediately when screenshare is stopped

How to make this work right?

Answer 1

This sounds an awful lot like it is being triggered by Aero, perhaps as a result of a video driver issue as George suggests. When enabled, the rendering pipeline for window chrome changes significantly, and may be flushing out bugs in either Visual Studio, WPF or the video drivers.

You can test this fairly easily: just disable Aero system-wide, and see if the crashes persist. You can find a guide to doing this here: http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/disable-aero-on-windows-vista/ - you can also just kill the DWM service directly, as described in How to quickly enable\disable Aero in Windows 7?.

If that works, then you should be able to disable it for just VS by opening the program's compatibility settings and checking "Disable desktop composition".

Alternately, hope that George's suggestion to update your drivers makes this go away.

Related:

• Visual Studio Crash when using Desktop Composition (Aero)

Answer 2

• Log into machine via remote desktop
• Start visual studio
• Go Tools > Options > Environment > General > Visual Experience
• Uncheck "Automatically adjust visual experience on client performance"
• Ok, done!
• Restart visual studio, should work fine now without remote desktop!