Visual Studio Professional 2013 Crashes When Opening Solutions/Files

Question

I\'ve been trying to open some of the webpage/database solutions I made while working for my previous employer, to get a refresher on what they were, but for some reason Vis

Answer 1

This is going to be the "answer from out of right field" but since it worked I want to share it with others. After trying to open a project and getting the "unsupported project type" error with Visual Studio 2013, I could no longer open any solution. I could load the IDE. But as soon as I tried to open a solution file, the IDE would crash with a message saying it was restarting and then ask if I wanted to debug or close the program. The same thing happened if I tried to load a solution file by double-clicking on it in an Explorer window. I tried uninstalling an Extension I recently added and even did a full reboot. Nothing worked. Also, there was no new activity in any of the ActivityLog.xml files I found in 3 different version directories. Also, deleting SUO files did not help either.

I then tried to create a brand new project. I just happened to pick an ASP.NET/MVC 4 Facebook app. Probably doesn't matter but just in case it does I'm including that detail. As soon as the brand new project was created I closed it and re-opened it. It re-opened fine, and after that all of my other solutions could be opened up again without error. So at least in my case, the act of creating a brand new project cleaned something up or re-initialized something properly and cleaned up the problem.