Visual Studio 2015 Crashes on new project

Question

I've been trying to resolve this issue for months, I completely uninstalled and reinstalled, repaired Visual Studio to no avail and get the same results.

I get this exception in debug:

An unhandled exception of type

Microsoft.VisualStudio.Composition.CompositionFailedException occurred in Microsoft.CodeAnalysis.Workspaces.dll

Additional information:

An exception was thrown while initializing part "Microsoft.VisualStudio.LanguageServices.Implementation.TaskList.CommentTaskTokenSerializer".

I've tried removing/renaming folders in %appdata%.

On this laptop I have other installations of VS which work fine. VS2008, VS2010 and SQL Server 2012.

Any help is greatly appreciated

Answer 1

I have figured it out.

Turns out access was being denied to a registry key.

Using Sysinternals Software Process Monitor I was able to see the key that was reporting ACCESS DENIED.

Process Monitor is a tool you can download for free.

I also Used PSTOOLS from Sysinternals Software for free to get the highest permissions possible for RegEdit. RegEdit alone would not let me change the Permissions for some reason.

I stumbled upon a different fix for VB6 and then decide to see if a similar issue was happening with Visual Studio, As I suspected it was denied registry access.

I set the permissions on the registry key to Full Control for my username, Everything is great and works now :)

FOLLOW THIS GUIDE, but use devenv.exe in the process monitor filter. TIP: Process monitor filters can be a bit confusing, its best to use IS NOT and then EXCLUDE when setting up filters for Process monitor so the result set only shows the desired results EX: Process Name, Is Not, devene.exe, Exclude then click add.

The explaination on the filters in the guide is ok but this method is much clearer.

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_other-msoffice_custom/a-step-by-step-procedure-for-fixing-error/3c81197e-a237-4fb7-8c8a-d28145f7428e

DOWNLOADS

PROCESS MONITOR

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645

PSTOOLS

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896649.aspx