What do I do with a corrupt installation of Visual Studio?

Matthew Busselberg 21 Reputation points
2021-07-11T20:56:30.787+00:00

I have been dealing with a serious problem with Visual Studio for some time. It started over a year ago (beginning of last June) with a glitch I was having with a DataGridView that I reported here https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/t/Visual-Studio-is-still-spontaneously-red/1376821?port=1025&fsid=c6b9dbc2-05d7-41c6-9d97-da9840d9530d&entry=myfeedback&ref=native&refTime=1626035473705&refUserId=8d80f21f-fe5e-405c-b2f8-b125fc60e957. After not experiencing the issue as much I got lax. Then yesterday, this glitch caused me to spend 2.5 hours yesterday reconstructing the work I had done after it re-appeared for the second time this week. The glitch is also now affecting more than one DataGridView.

While I mentioned I had trouble with several things regarding the constant re-draw issues in the above linked conversation, I realized that I never mentioned another issue that I have been experiencing for several months now that I thought was unrelated but now feel is another symptom of the underlying cause. About one out of every 3-4 times I start Visual studio I cannot even view both the code or the designer for the class that uses the DataGridView's in question. Both tabs show up as completely blank. Sometimes this happens with other Forms as well (another reason I thought it was a separate issue). Most often this happens the first time I start Visual Studio after turning my computer on or rebooting the computer. I have to close Visual studio and re-start it before I can work with Windows Forms classes, particularly ones that use DataGridViews.

Yesterday ANOTHER issue started to occur. The class tabs and/or the interacting with the Designer stops functioning and when I closed Visual Studio and attempt to restart, it would not even run. I kept getting a message: "Setup requires the computer to be restarted before Visual Studio can run". So I restart my computer, restart Visual Studio an wham... again I cannot access the Windows.Forms classes until I restart again.

I do a search for this message online and all I can seem to find are messages that occur during VS Installation that don't quite convey the same issue. I AM NOT installing VS 2019. I have had it on my computer since I had to do a clean reinstall of Windows after hardware replacement just over a year ago. It was just after this install when these problems first started. I update it every now and then, hoping it will fix it but that hasn't happened. Instead, the number of symptoms of the underlying problem are growing. I am becoming more and more convinced that I have had a corrupt installation of VS since day 1. How do I COMPLETELY WIPE this installation of Visual Studio 2019 and start again? Files, Registry, EVERYTHING!!!

Visual Studio
Visual Studio
A family of Microsoft suites of integrated development tools for building applications for Windows, the web and mobile devices.
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  1. PengGe-MSFT 3,331 Reputation points
    2021-07-12T02:13:18.657+00:00

    Hi @Matthew Busselberg

    Welcome to Microsoft Q&A!

    To uninstall the VS 2019, please follow the steps as below to clean up the installed VS:

    1. See if you have this file on your machine: "%programfiles(x86)%\Microsoft Visual Studio\Installer\resources\app\layout\InstallCleanup.exe", if so, you can refer to this document to uninstall Visual Studio.
    2. If you cannot find the InstallCleanup tool, you can refer to this document to try to uninstall Visual Studio.
    3. After the uninstallation is complete, you can search for "Visual Studio" and "visualstudio" in the C drive to delete all the searched files.
      You can delete the registry in the following path: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio . Please make a backup before deleting.

    If your issue still persists, feel free to let me know.

    Sincerely,
    Peng
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