why is vs2010 so slow lately? Its nearly unusable

Question

Not sure what has happened on my dev machine but I can barely use visual studio 2010 these days. I have a copy of professional edition installed on a win7 pro x64 build running on top of a i5 M430 and 6 gigs of ram.

With only VS2010 open i've seen the process leak away to 600,000k+.

The editor is extremely slow. Every character I type sends the gui into "Not Responding" for 5 seconds and starting/stopping the debugger is a ~30 second operation.

I've done a repair install. No change. I've removed productivity power tools and installed the perfwatson extension.

When I installed perfwatson the GUI sped up a bit while opening/loading a project. But the text editor still has an awful delay.

What else can I do? Harware rendering is off in my environment options.

an example of the slowness (literally): typing Height="1024" takes about 30 seconds to display in the text editor and do its update flash to go out of not responding. The word "Height=" takes 5 seconds to show. The intellesense and blank " " takes another 5 seconds. Each digit pops in every five seconds after that.

Needless to say even trying to edit existing work is a frustrating experience.

edit: rolled back one version on video driver. No noticeable changes after reboot.

edit: did some winforms projects today. No slow issues with this project type. Must be something with just wpf/sl projects.

edit 8/18/11: Took troublesome project to the production server. VS2010 editor works great there. Very snappy and responsive. Not at all slow. So it's not something inside my project. It's something in my machine. But a full out OS rebuild is something I can't just do now. Probably will start a bounty soon.

Answer 1

Delete the .sdf and .sou that have the same base file name as your solution file.
If your solution file is

c:\MyProject\project.sln

You should delete

c:\MyProject\project.sdf  
c:\MyProject\project.sou  

This solves 98% of the problems of slow VS.
These files contain intermediate information that is not important for the functionality of the solution and as time goes by they swell up and become bloated and fragmented. VS relies on these files for and if dealing with them is slow, everything is slow.

Answer 2

I know this is an old post but I have just had an issue where my visual studio project has been working fine for about 2 1/2 years and suddenly every time I clicked run I had to wait about 3 minutes and the same when clicking stop. I tried the old windows reboot but to no avail.

I found a post about deleting the projects .suo file (it was only 4MB).

I deleted the .suo file and everything is completely back to normal. I guess the file had corrupted or something.