Excel TFS Add-In Crashes Connecting to TFS

Question

We frequently use Excel to perform bulk updates of data in TFS. Up until very recently, the Team Foundation Add-In has worked very well. However, it has started failing in several ways:

• It will connect to the server, but attempting to connect to any project causes Excel to crash, producing a Watson report in the Windows Application Event Log.

• If I restart Excel, it reports that it is running into problems with both the shim and the add-in, and offers to disable it. If I do not disable it, I still can't connect to a project.

• Eventually, the add-in refuses to load at all, until I use the Options dialog to manually add the COM add-in back into the application. Doing so produces the same results (Excel crashes when attempting to load a project).

I have taken the following steps in an attempt to resolve the issue:

1. Removed and completely reinstalled Office.
2. Re-registered the add-in component.
3. Uninstalled and reinstalled Team Foundation Office Integration.

None of these have produced a fix to the issue.

Does anyone know how to resolve this issue?

P.S. If this is not the correct "stack" for this question, kindly point me to the correct one on the exchange. Thank you.

Answer 1

If you are reading the accepted answer and it still isn't working, here's an additional tip. I had the EXACT same problem and saw that same link to clear the cache from numerous sites, bit it didn't work.

Here's the thing. I don't think that article lists ALL of the places that cache can be hiding on your machine. I deleted the cache folder in two different places on my machine and had given up on that as a solution.

Then I searched my entire hard drive for any folder with "Team Foundation" in the name and found a couple more buried in other hierarchies. Deleting these FINALLY solved the problem.

Here are some folders to look for, but like I said, check the entire drive

c:\users\yourlogin\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Team Foundation
c:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft shared\Team Foundation Server\
c:\users\yourlogin\AppData\Local\Temp\Microsoft\Team Foundation

The actual cache folder will be nested another level deep under a numbered folder named with something like "7.0" or "8.0" delete the cache folder from every one you find under every number.

Answer 2

In general cleaning the caches on your client machine will resolve such problems, including the TFS and VS caches...

To clean the caches, please see How to clear the TFS cache on client machines