I recently found myself upgrading my Microsoft Office environment from 2007 to 2010. I imagine that a number of people have already begun or will begin this process of transitioning in the next several months. Unfortunately, upon completing the full uninstall of Office 2007 and installing Office 2010, I opened up Visual Studio to find that anytime I open up a markup page “.aspx” it locks the environment, and killing the Visual Studio process is the only way out.

After a day of frustration and reboots trying to solve the issue, I went out to the web to find a solution. Eventually, I came across an interesting blog (you can imagine that under the Google term “VS2008 Locks on ASPX” a ton of stuff comes up). The blog says that if you look at the processes that begin running when VS2008 locks up you’ll notice a “Setup.exe” process is running….. very odd. The blog suggests that you reinstall Office 2007 – odd since I just installed Office 2010. These setup files that are running are leftovers from the 2007 uninstall that didn’t get cleaned up. So instead of “reinstalling” anything, I renamed the “Setup.exe” file found at:

C:Program Files (x86)Common Filesmicrosoft sharedOFFICE12Office Setup ControllerSetup.exe

 Renamed it to something like “Setup.old” and restart Visual Studio, and you are good to go!!! Now the obvious question is why is VS2008 Markup pages starting a random .exe file found? I cannot even begin to answer that other than the possibility that it is trying to run the default editor (not that Microsoft Office was my default editor though)….who knows…

The blog this information came from is found at: http://abdullin.com/journal/2009/5/12/visual-studio-2008-locks-or-freezes-in-aspx.html