Code Over Easy

Visual Studio 2012 has unexpectedly stopped

Wow, what a mess.

After installing Visual Studio 2012 Update 2, whenever I would launch VS2012, the start page would come up, and then the application would immediately crash.

Simultaneously (and I suspect related) in Visual Studio 2010, when I would try to view the Team Explorer, all my team projects were showing with a nice big red ‘X’ on them.  I could not expand the project node, which means I could not get to any work items, or the Source Code Explorer.

Also of note, an automatic Windows Update had taken the liberty of installing Internet Explorer 10.  Gee, thanks for that.

After spending a full day trying to remove Visual Studio hotfixes, repair VS2012, rebooting (and more rebooting).  I was getting nowhere.

I installed DebugDiag and tried to make sense of the crash dumps.  No smoking gun there.

I googled for clr.dll and ntdll.dll and kernelbase.dll.  All red herrings.

Then I tried to launch SQL Server Management Studio 2008 got this error:

Unable to cast COM object of type ‘System.__ComObject’ to interface type ‘Microsoft.VisualStudio.OLE.Interop.IServiceProvider’. This operation failed because the QueryInterface call on the COM component for the interface with IID ‘{6D5140C1-7436-11CE-8034-00AA006009FA}’ failed due to the following error: No such interface supported (Exception from HRESULT: 0×80004002 (E_NOINTERFACE)). (Microsoft.VisualStudio.OLE.Interop)

Okay, this is a mess.  I would not have guessed that SSMS would have pulled in anything from Visual Studio, but there it was, plain as day.

Looking for guidance on this error brought me to this blog post, which gave the following explanation:

You would get above error if ieproxy.dll is not registered properly. Re register Ieproxy.dll.

C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer>regsvr32 /u ieproxy.dll
C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer>regsvr32 ieproxy.dll
C:\Program Files (x86)\Internet Explorer>regsvr32 /u ieproxy.dll
C:\Program Files (x86)\Internet Explorer>regsvr32 ieproxy.dll
Following these steps threw errors on the /u calls, but showed success messages on the register calls.
Big moment of truth – launching VS2010 and going to Team Explorer.  Fantastic!  Loaded without nasty red X.
Bigger moment of truth – launching VS2012.  Opened and stayed open!
And SSMS loaded up great as well.
My guess is that either during the IE10 install, or the Update 2 install, or the dozens of other Windows Update hotfixes and security updates, that ieproxy.dll got either corrupted or unregistered without being put back in place.
Now the task of adding back Update 2 and seeing if it is the problem or was just a victim of some other undoing.

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derek

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One response to “Visual Studio 2012 has unexpectedly stopped”

  1. richard sidell Avatar
    richard sidell

    Microsoft is well aware of this problem. It has existed for over a year, maybe longer, and they do not seem to have the slightest interest in fixing it.

    What they do is to leave you a message in the flag box telling you the url of the Microsoft web site that explains how to fix the problem, by re-registering ieproxy.dll

    It will happen regularly if you install from an imperfect MSI (maybe a third party), but it will also happen periodically just to keep you on your toes.

    Reply

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