What to Do if Visual Studio 2022 Freezes at Start-up

I had an annoying experience at the NDC workshop: when I tried to load the solution for the workshop, my Visual Studio immediately froze. It took me a few rounds to try to start Visual Studio without any code. But even then, Visual Studio was still unresponsive.

If this happens to you, it is probably a plug-in that Visual Studio cannot load correctly. You can find the location of your Visual Studio by right-clicking on the Visual Studio icon (1), then click on “Visual Studio 2022 Current” (2) and then a final click on the “Properties” entry (3):

From the Properties dialog we can copy the path to devenv.exe in the Target field:

That path should be something like this:

“C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\Enterprise\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe”

Open a command prompt as Administrator and go to the directory in which deven.exe is located:

You can now start Visual Studio in safe mode:

This opens Visual Studio but first deactivates all extensions and plug-ins. You can now remove the problematic extension or start uninstalling one by one until Visual Studio works correctly (start with the latest one).

In my case it was the Oz Code extension that decided at that day to ignore my license key. Removing the extension until I got a new license key solved my freezing Visual Studio instantly.