Fixing the "application cannot start" issue

In my last blog post I described how dragging around the docked tool windows causes some type of corruption that means that Visual Studio 2010 will not load giving an error of "The application cannot start". I played around a bit with this until I decided that it must be some user data issue and hence I decided to reset all the settings that I had made in the brief time I had used VS2010. The way to do this is to use the /resetuserdata command line switch:

1. Click Start Menu
2. Click All Programs, Visual Studio 2010, Visual Studio Tools
3. Click Visual Studio Command Prompt (2010) shortcut
4. At the command prompt type devenv /resetuserdata
5. Nothing appear to happen for a few seconds, and then the command prompt appears indicating that the process has completed.
   

Now when you start Visual Studio 2010 you will no longer get the error dialog, but you will have to set all the options that you may have set before. After finding a workaround I went to the connect website to bug the issue and found that it had already been reported: Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 crashes with "The application cannot start." dialog (WinDbg output attached).