Disclaimer: The original issue was resolved by installing all the features of VS2008;
However, if your Visual Studio 2008 crashes (especially at startup), like mine, even without Qt or any other add-ons: open eventvwr.exe and find the error with exception code 5 (write access violation) at offset 0x0000bdb8 in msenv.dll .
This is a known bug for which there is officially no workaround other than upgrading to VS2010.
In my experience, sometimes this will not happen for a long time, sometimes you will need 2-4 attempts to start an empty VS2008, and sometimes (in another environment, such as Windows Server 2008) there is no retry and a reboot will help.
If you work in a controlled environment limited to specific versions of Windows and Visual Studio, try reducing the startup frequency of the version VS2008 DEVENV.EXE . There are mitigation scenarios:
- Use another IDE such as CLION (commercial product) or just Notepad ++ / WinDbg
- Use IncrediBuild (commercial product, but FreeDev licenses are available): in command line mode, it bypasses the loaded GUI DEVENV.EXE
- Use MSBuild or any other Microsoft compiler call that can bypass DEVENV.EXE
- Use smaller, but larger VS-solutions with a large number of projects, and not many 1-project solutions.
Finally, just in case the Social MSDN link stops working, here is a screenshot:
