Error HRESULT E_FAIL has been returned from a call to a COM component

Question

In Silverlight 4 app; what does this error mean?:

\"Error HRESULT E_FAIL has been returned from a call to a COM component.\"

It

Answer 1

This is an old question but in my case, none of the above solutions worked. I was trying to update the NuGet packages in Visual Studio 2017 but I was getting the following Exception.

update-package : Failed to add reference to 'System.Web.Razor'.
  Error HRESULT E_FAIL has been returned from a call to a COM component.

In fact, other NuGet commands like restore-package were failing with similar exception message.

I discovered a few assemblies were missing under the packages directory so I deleted the packages directory and returned back to the Visual Studio 2017. When I opened the solution it asked me to restore the packages and after that, I was able to update the packages.

NOTE: Take a backup of package directory before deleting it.