Visual Studio Woes

I was working on converting an ASP.NET 1.1 web site to ASP.NET 2.0 today but I will probably regret it because I have been having problems with Visual Studio 2005 and Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition. Ever since I have installed Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition I've been finding the msiexec.exe (Windows Installer) process running and bogging down my PC. This occurs every now and then when I'm using either Visual Studio 2005 or the Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition. Below is a screenshot of the culprit in Process Explorer where you can see it hogging the CPU.

I've tried running Visual Studio in safe mode but that does not solve the problem. Then I tried re-installing a few things like the Slickedit Gadgets. Today I completely reinstalled Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition. I am not having this problem at work. It only affects my home computer. As far as I can figure it out, Visual Studio is trying to repair something. It does not matter what project I am working on. I can't get any work done without Process Explorer open so I can kill the msiexec.exe process.

 Process Explorer

2 Comments


  • How about letting your machine run through the night? Maybe it will finish installing by then.

    In addition, look at the handles in ProcessExplorer (Ctrl + L) to see if there are any interesting files in use. Also use FileMon to see if a log file is being written anywhere.

  • I think I have finally solved this problem. I had both the Standard and Professional versions of Visual Studio 2005 installed. Tonight I uninstalled the Service Pack 1 for the Standard Edition and I have not caught Windows Installer running since.

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