How to stop Visual Studio 2010 SP1 “configuration” every time I start an Office 2010 app?

Question

A recent Windows Update or software installation seems to have broken my one week old Dell XPS 17 which comes pre-configured with Office 2010 Home and Business edition. I installed Visual Studio 2010 on top and then SP1 and then the Silverlight 5 Tools for Visual Studio. This is all on a 64-bit version of Windows 7 Ultimate edition.

Whenever I start Outlook or Word an annoying Visual Studio 2010 "configuration" dialog pops up and runs for several minutes, locking the Office 2010 app out until it's completed.

I found a report of the problem on Microsoft Connect for the Release Candidate of VS2010 and the suggested fix was to add a "missing" folder Program Files (x86)\\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\\Common7\\IDE**FromGAC**

That empty folder is already there.

Another suggestion was to "repair" Office 2010. Done that. Again it didn't fix the problem.

Anybody know how I can fix this. I'm using an SSD to make my system lighting fast from boot up. This is making it just as bad as a very slow hard drive!

Answer 1

Okay I could fix it on my PC system.

1. Start the Procmon.exe tool from sysinternals
2. Start OL (or another apps like Word) and wait until the VS reconfigureing windows apears.
3. Stop Procmon.exe
4. Look to the "Z:" resource OL is looking for remember the reg path
5. Open REGEDIT and search for this reg path
6. If found (you should) rename drive Z: to another existing drive like K:
7. Repeat step 4. to 6. util no more Z:'s are available
8. Start OL again and bingo the reconfigure windows from VS will not popup any more.

I would suggest to use the C: drive instead of K:, becasue the C: drive always exists.