After installing Visual Studio 2008 SP1 on my laptop with Vista Ultimate I suddenly experienced a lot of crashes while working. The crashes seemed random at first, but also appeared to become more frequent and of course increasingly annoying.

To begin with I figured that something might have been corrupted, as I previously had the SP1 Beta installed as well as a lot of other beta stuff, so I uninstalled everything related to Visual Studio and .Net and a few installed updates, and reinstalled Visual Studio from scratch and updated to SP1.

But that didn't help. Problem was still there, and I was truly puzzled and a bit angry, as I am preparing my Entity Framework talk at ONUG and need to update my demos, and obviously have a stabile environment for the demo (I suppose this is where I start considering a VPC for that purpose).

So now I looked in the event log, where I got the very little informative error message:

"Program med fejl devenv.exe, version 9.0.30729.1, tidsstempel 0x488f2b50, modul med fejl unknown, version 0.0.0.0, tidsstempel 0x00000000, undtagelseskode 0xc0000005, forskydning med fejl 0x777833fe, proces-id 0x1978, programmets starttidspunkt 0x01c9102ed5c3f8a0."

Having no clue what is causing this random error, I decide to notice exactly what I do before the error occurs. I notice that it always happens when I enter debug mode in visual studio. So far so good, but otherwise it just seems totally random.

I decide to make an error dump with Debugging Tools. And now I just have to reproduce the error. Now this is strange, because no matter how many times I entered debug mode it just didn't crash. Typical. Until I finally remember that I had been undocking and redocking my tool windows, because they where cluttering up the interface. And this was it!!

So because I undocked my tools, Visual Studio crashed when entering debug mode. I googled it and found this error report. But no immediate solution, just "Thanks for reporting the issue. It has been reproduced and will be addressed in a future version or patch of Visual Studio."

The only thing to do at the moment, if you have the problem, is to leave the tool windows docked, and if you have to move them or redock them, then first close the window, open it again and reposition it.