Visual Studio 2012 cannot be started after an upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 8

Question

I recently upgraded my Windows 7 pro version to a Windows 8 pro version. Everything went smoothly, and all programs and services (including SQL server) are working normaly, except for Visual Studio: it stopped working and keeps on displaying the message "Microsoft Visual Studio professional has stopped working ... Windows will close the program and notify you if a solution is available".

What I cannot do:

• I cannot start the debugger because ... it's calling VS 2012 to debug
• I cannot uninstall VS 2012 (same message)
• I cannot reinstall VS 2012 from its original CD (same message)
• I cannot even do that in safe mode (after forcing the restart of Windows Installer Service)

What I did:

• google for similar problems
• cleaned the registry, etc.

• check the application log, noticing this error:

  • Faulting application name: vs_professional.exe, version: 11.0.50727.1, time stamp: 0x4fd9f28c
  • Faulting module name: igdumd32.dll, version: 9.17.10.2932, time stamp: 0x50c92441
  • Exception code: 0xc0000005
  • Fault offset: 0x0001a56a
  • Faulting process ID: 0x1988
  • Faulting application start time: 0x01ce35224e886a32
  • Faulting application path: C:\vs\vs_professional.exe
  • Faulting module path: C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\igdumd32.dll

What I still did not do:

• make a fresh installation of Windows 8 (or 7)

I hope someone could give me an idea ...

PS: Windows 7 was En-US, while Windows 8 is En-En. One would say there is no reason for this to have an impact ... but ... who knows?

Answer 1

This appears to be a graphics driver issue.

See here, here and here.

A couple of suggested solutions from those pages:

1. Update your graphics drivers
2. DisableHWAcceleration = 1 (useful if you can't update your drivers for some reason)
3. Rollback to a previous driver version (or in your case uninstall and reinstall with an older version)