VS2010 command prompt gives error: Cannot determine the location of the VS Common Tools folder

Question

I have installed VS2010. The installation creates the shortcut for VS2010 command prompt but when I open up the command prompt I get the error:

Cannot determine the location of the VS Common Tools folder.

I checked the environment variable VS100COMNTOOLS and it has value: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\Tools\ and the registry for HKEY_local_Machine\Software\Microsoft\Visual Studio\SxS\VS7 is set to: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\.

I checked the VSvars32.bat and tried to add echo to find till where it proceeds. It fails at this command:

@call :GetVSCommonToolsDirHelper32 HKLM > nul 2>&1 

Answer 1

I had the same issue and found the answer here.

The problem is that the bat uses de reg command and it searches that in the PATH system variable. Somehow you have managed to get "C:\Windows\System32" out of the PATH variable, so just go to the system variables (right click "My Computer" > "Properties" > advanced config > "Environment Variables", search the PATH variable and add at the end separated by ";" : C:\Windows\System32

Answer 2

I had the same problems in two machines: Win8.1x64 with Visual Studio Ultimate 2013 (VS2013) and Win8x64 with VS2013 ultimate

Problem: Shortcut "VS2012 x86 Native Tools Command Prompt" which points to file: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\VC\vcvarsall.bat which calls C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\VC\bin\vcvars32.bat tries to search the registry for value name "11.0":

reg query "%1\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\SxS\VS7" /v "11.0" 

However my machine doesn't have this value "11.0", instead it has "12.0"

My solution is to run C:\Program Files (x86)\ Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0 \VC\vcvarsall.bat which calls C:\Program Files (x86)\ Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0 \VC\bin\vcvars32.bat which correctly query the registry as the following:

reg query "%1\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\SxS\VS7" /v "12.0" 

So changing/running from C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\VC\vcvarsall.bat to C:\Program Files (x86)\ Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0 \VC\vcvarsall.bat solved it in my case