I'm at a standstill, and I'm considering formatting my hard drive and starting fresh. I thought I would try this as a last effort. When I open Visual Studio 2012 (not a solution, just VS itself), it usually freezes in a few minutes. Last time (see XML below), it hung for about 13 minutes.
The following is a snippet from ActivityLog.xml when starting VS using the /log switch. I do not know what to do with this data. Many search engines showed others with similar but not identical problems. If you notice the timestamps below, you will see that the problem is centered around "Loading the user interface library." Any idea what this really means or how to fix it?
Note. VsLogUI.dll does not exist in the specified folder, so I'm not sure why it is trying to access it. This file also does not exist on my other laptop. And the path has two features in it, and it searches for a folder named IDE *. Everything seems to be ruined.
<entry> <record>1054</record> <time>2012/12/08 20:30:30.175</time> <type>Information</type> <source>VisualStudio</source> <description>End package load [Visual Studio Logging Package]</description> <guid>{2DC9DAA9-7F2D-11D2-9BFC-00C04F9901D1}</guid> </entry> <entry> <record>1055</record> <time>2012/12/08 20:33:51.723</time> <type>Information</type> <source>VisualStudio</source> <description>Loading UI library</description> <guid>{2DC9DAA9-7F2D-11D2-9BFC-00C04F9901D1}</guid> <path>C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\\Common7\IDE*\VsLogUI.dll</path> </entry> <entry> <record>1056</record> <time>2012/12/08 20:42:28.350</time> <type>Information</type> <source>VisualStudio</source> <description>Entering function CVsPackageInfo::HrInstantiatePackage</description> <guid>{F384B236-B4A9-401B-BC58-3106E3ACA3EC}</guid> </entry>
EDIT - I got this as an answer below, but that didn't work. It worked for several VS launches, but after installing some extensions, the delay occurred again. I am stuck.
While I don't know why this happened, I seem to have found a workaround. After creating a text file and renaming it to VsLogUI.dll, VS 2012 began to open quickly. Apparently, this file is simply necessary for existence. I said:
C: \ Program Files (x86) \ Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0 \ Common7 \ IDE \
I am sure that this work will work, although I am a little afraid to try it because it changes the registry. I guess I can back up the registry. In any case, this appears in the registry:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ Wow6432Node \ Microsoft \ MSDN \ 8.0 \ Packages {2DC9DAA9-7F2D-11d2-9BFC-00C04F9901D1}
It has a subfolder called SatelliteDll. This property is called DllName with the value of VsLogUI.dll. I bet if I delete the registry entry, the problem goes away.