Got Burned Today
I'm about an hour and a half into my work day and still haven't successfully loaded Visual Studio. Yesterday, I was trying to clear all my breakpoints via hot keys (CTRL + ALT + F9). Somehow while executing that command I fat fingered on of the keys that had to do with macros. Suddenly, my machine is processing unintended commands and error messages are firing all over the place. At that point it was the end of the day, so I just worked past the errors and continued debugging so I could finish out the day.
This morning I came in and Visual Studio wouldn't load. The error message was "Cannot load the recording macro project '' for the following reason: 'Visual Studio 2008Projects\VSMacros80\MyMacros\MyMacros.vsmacros' is and invalid or inaccessible macro project file Would you like to recreate it?" No matter what option I choose the IDE just sits there processing...something. There's no feedback so I have no idea what its trying to do. After diverting my attention for about 15 minutes to http://news.ycombinator.com, I came back to the same situation. At the point, I started doing some Google research which quickly reached a dead end. The limited number of suggestions point to a Visual Studio reinstall.
Alright! So now we're back in business right? No, this hasn't helped the issue at all.
When you answer the message, Visual Studio processes at 90% CPU. I had to run off on some personal business and I knew I was going to be gone a while so I decided to leave Visual Studio plugging away on this issue to see if VS would finish the process. After two hours, it still did not correct itself. So I continued on with my original observation. The path to the MyMacros seemed incorrect. I searched for the entry in my registry and found it at HKEY_USERS\...\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\vsmacros\RecordingProject7\Path. I changed the path to the absolute path where it was located then did similarly for the keys above titled "OtherProjects7". Once I fixed the path Visual Studio was loaded and I was back in business.