Visual Studio 2008 Package Fails to Load

Yet another item for practicing The Art of Work Around(r).

This time, I was tackling an installation package that has been giving my client a hard time. While debugging the installer Visual Studio began crushing following the message: “Visual Studio Explorer [or Settings] and Designer Package failed to load properly….” The message indicated that I could choose to skip loading the package and resset skipping using the command line switch ‘/resetskippkgs’.

Restoring the solution from backup, I was able to proceed with debugging the installer.

Looking at the solution folder, I found the solution user options file (.suo)grew to some 57MB. Deleting this file solved the problem.

Workaround: delete the solution ‘sou’ file.