WinFx prevents Visual Studio .NET from Launching

That error does not occur here (although I'm using XP). Do you have any third-party addons installed in Visual Studio? What version of WindowFX are you running?

Currently I am running WinFx 2.20c[b].003, but the problem also happened in the previous version. The OS definitely has something to do with it, I have used WinFx before under WinXP with no problems.

No 3rd party addons to VS are installed, only MSDN Library help files.

Also, the OS was installed fresh from the corporate image and VS ran fine, untill I installed WinFx.

I am also noticing that Debugging my applications cause a lot of crashing if Visual Studio is not in WinFx's exclusion list. With Visual Studio excluded, I only have to deal with the problems launching visual studio.

Hello,
I've a similarly problem. I get an "unknow Error" when I launch VS2003, and this is arisen after I modify something with IconPackager.

I don't know what is WinFX, how can I know it was running on my laptop ?

Thanks for any help
Daniel

Hello,
it's well IconPackager the responsible !
With many difficulties I uninstall all Stardock.
But there is no uninstaller as for IconPackager. The iprepair.dll must be unloaded manually from memory before complete deletion.

And now VS 2003 works well
Stardock must not use components unstable for WinXP without warning !

Daniel

All you need to do is unregister the iprepair.dll. No need to uninstall anything.

from the start --> run (or a command prompt) type:
regsvr32 /u iprepair.dll
and all will be good again.

Hopefully stardock will fix this soon.

Yesterday (before I had seen this thread) I re-installed VisualStudio.NET2003 as well as the .NETFramework to try and resolve this "unknown error" problem while starting. Still didn't work. I was really pulling my hair out wondering what the f had happened to my machine. The next step was to re-install XP, which would be a major pain. I sure didn't suspect IconPackager, since I've never seen a system conflict with any Stardock stuff before, and besides, what would an Icon tweaker have to do with starting VS? Good thing I googled this issue one last time and saw this thread- now all is well.

This problem also happened to me, and I found this thread only seconds before reinstalling visual studio, and I am very happy I did.

I'm also glad I found this thread! I was browing in the IconPackager Forum, where several users have similar problems. After installing IconPackager, Windows Help & Support and the Control Panel does not work, and Photoshop 5.5 crashes on startup. Uninstalling Iconpackager does not help. I was not aware you have to remove this dll I had to restore from a backup to get my system working again

My lord. I've been dealing with this for hours and hours with reinstalls of Visual Studio (various versions), newest MSDN library, etc. It started happening on my work machine (which is Win2k) and I was in heap big trouble if I couldn't run Visual Studio (being that I'm a software developer.) Then I noticed MSDN Library and SQL Server Books Online couldn't open anymore and threw the same error. I figured it had to be something with the help browser - dexplore.exe (Microsoft Help 2). Gave same "unknown error" on launching all by it's lonesome. Just when I was about to give up I tried one more google: ["visual studio" 2003 "unknown error"] (I was previously googling devenv instead of ["visual studio" 2003]) and this thread came up on the first hit.
I never would have expected IconPackager either, for sure. Stardock stuff has been rock-solid since the OS/2 days.
Bottom line:
Simply unregistering iprepair.dll as described above by Snype451 does the trick. (out of curiosity, did you have to use win debugger to find out it was that DLL since you couldn't launch VS? Thank you so much for posting the fix!)
Stardock:
iprepair.dll is clobbering MS Help 2 (%program files%\common files\microsoft shared\help\dexplore.exe.)

I found this topic tonight and am I glad I did. This was causing problems with a lot of apps on my system (4NT, TakeCommand, Quicken 2005, various Thinkpad utilities) for at least a week now. Once I unregistered the DLL, everything started working again.

Thanks for the detective work!