Visual Studio 2010 Crashes on startup after installing Productivity Power Tools

In Programming Tags #vs2010 #visual-studio Published 10/22/2010

VS Version: Visual Studio 2010 Professional Add on: Productivity Power Tools (Microsoft), October 22, 2010 Release (10.0.10819.19) I installed this on two workstations, on one it worked fine. On the other it crashed Visual Studio immediately after the Start Page finished loading. That left no way to uninstall of disable the extension without jumping through a few hoops (starting VS2010 in safe mode). Here's how to do that:

  1. Start Visual Studio Command Prompt (2010) (or, start a regular command prompt and navigate to the Visual Studio 2010 directory that has devenv.exe).
  2. Type devenv /SafeMode. This will start Visual Studio 2010 with the extensions you've installed disabled.
  3. Under Tools, go to Extension Manager and then uninstall the Productivity Power Tools from there. Visual Studio will ask you to restart, you can choose that option or manually close it and restart it yourself. When I choose to restart, it instead opens my copy of Visual Studio 2008.

This method should work to disable most extensions that crash VS on startup.

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