Starting Visual Studio causes all running apps to hang and stop responding

Question

After my laptop fell on the floor and its screen was a little damaged, I was able to continue working with it, but failed to build a project of mine. At some point, the system froze, and I was forced to restart the laptop. Ever since, I’m not able to start Visual Studio 2008 or 2010. Moreover, when I do try to start one of the versions, I see no splash screen, and at some point, all running applications stop responding, and I’m forced to restart the laptop.

When I started Visual Studio 2008 with the /SafeMode flag it started OK and worked perfectly, but when I tried it with Visual Studio 2010, I did see a splash screen and the application main window was opened, but then the system got stuck again and forced me to restart.

I use Windows XP SP3, and the addins I recall I have are Visual Assist, IncrediBuild, and Productivity Power Tools for VS 2010 (how can I check what other addins are installed without having Visual Studio running?)

I tried using the /Log flag to find out what’s happening, but there was nothing that seemed related in the generated log.

At the time of the hang, the CPU and memory of the system was low. The problem happens whether I open Visual Studio with no solution, or with an existing solution.

Do you have any idea why this might happen, or how it can be solved?

Edit:
I run chkdsk /R /V and it is stuck on "1 percent completed." for hours now. Is there anything I can do? I'll try to re-install Visual Studio 2010 next week, when I'm in the office. I hope that will help.

Thanks a lot,
splintor

Answer 1

Your drive is torched. Buy a new drive, and salvage whatever you can from the existing drive, then swap them out. If you're lucky you can salvage enough of the existing drive to not need to do a full OS reinstall, but it's likely you're going to need to do some reinstallation.

Answer 2

You've probably damaged your hard disk in an area which is touched by VS. Windows often grinds completely to a halt when it's struggling to read a damaged area of disk.

Check the Windows event log for errors to do with disk drives.

Answer 3

If I was diagnosing this issue, I would start from the ground up.

Start of with a basic CheckDisc - CheckDisk Instructions for XP

Progress from that to try re-installing over your existing VS install.

I can't see it being a software problem, so I reckon the checkdisk will discover/fix something, or a reinstall should resolve it.

Dave

Answer 4

Looks like the cause if the fall of your laptop. Though what changes happened is unknown it is more likely to be a hardware issue.

Did you reinstall the softwares and check how they work.