I did a whole bunch of searching and discovered that there were some incompatibilities with Office 2010 beta (an incompatible DLL) that was causing most of the problems. Not in my case though because I'd never installed Office 2010. If, however, you are reading this and you have installed a version of Office 2010 then you might want to search further as that might be your problem.
I contacted the developers at Microsoft and they were outstanding in the help that they provided me. I downloaded a debugger and created some memory dumps of what was happening in VS2010 when it started and sent them off to Microsoft. They isolated that the problem was happening when the machine.config file was being loaded. I know that I had edited my machine.config and so I became suspicious of my edit.
A quick aside about machine.config's. On a 32-bit operating system with .NET 2 installed there's only one machine.config and that usually lives here:
C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\CONFIG
If you have installed VS2010 then that means that you have also installed .NET 4 so there's another machine.config for .NET 4 and you can find that here:
C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\Config
(On my machine this is the one that VS2010 is using even though I'm running Windows 7 x64.)
If you have a 64-bit OS then you have 64-bit versions of these machine.config's as well taking the total to four. These can be found here:
C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v2.0.50727\CONFIG
C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\Config
(I don't know why one is in capitals and the other in proper case.)
An analysis of my machine.config's (all 4 of them) showed that I have incorrectly edited 2 of them. I had added a new section to the machine.config but had failed to add that section name to the sectionGroup. So I was missing this part of the machine.config:
Which goes inside the
In the end it was a PIBKAC* and not a VS2010 bug.
*PIBKAC = Problem Is Between Keyboard And Chair
View this post here....
http://guyellisrocks.com/software/vs2010-quot-cannot-create-the-window-quot/
