cannot download help viewer content for VS 17.10.4

Question

we installed Visual studio 2022 17.10.4

F1 did not open the help viewer but it did open the browser to MS

So we set the VS app to use the inbuilt help viewer. now on F1 the viewer opens but it has no data. We need to download help content. So we checked many boxes to download the contents but it wanted to run as administrator. we used an admin elevation when prompted by the OS and the received an error from the help viewer about having to use the user account not admin. Grrr

So we can't download any help content?

help!

Answer 1

Hello @daz,

Welcome to Microsoft Q&A forum.

Please try to restart your machine but log on with the account which has administrative permissions, run VS as administrator, open Help Viewer and check if you can download the content.

The content can also be downloaded by using command lines(Command-line arguments for the Help Content Manager). For example, following command line(run CMD as admin and run the command) installs English content from the internet:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Help Viewer\v2.3\hlpctntmgr.exe /operation install /catalogname VisualStudio15 /locale en-us

The local store path, by default, should be C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\HelpLibrary2\Catalogs\VisualStudio15\.

If you fail to install the content from VS Help Viewer, you can try the command line. After you run the command, if you want to check the installation progress, you can close Help Viewer, open it from VS again, on bottom right, you should see the progress.

Besides, are you using multiple accounts on this machine? Is there any limitation based on specific account on specific folders/directories which might block Help Viewer from downloading content?

Best Regards,

Tianyu

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