Visual Studio 2005: Project / Properties Display Errors

The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it. -- George Orwell

I'm posting this fix because it is extremely difficult to find on the web. In certain situations, the underlying COM dll's or type libraries that "help" the Visual Studio IDE perform its various functions get unregistered, causing any number of different symptoms. This can happen for example if you've installed an Orcas Beta (which does it's own set of "stuff"), then uninstalled or done a repair or upgrade on Visual Studio 2005 on the same machine.

Most of these COM Server "helper" dlls and tlbs can be found here:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE

You need to re-register those of these that are COM Servers. Of course, you cannot know which are and which are not, but running REGSVR32.EXE on all of them cannot hurt anything. What I did to make this easy is first to create a list of all of them. You can do this from a DOS window with the command:

dir /b *.dll >list.txt

This will create a directory listing and pipe it to the list.txt text file.

N.B. Thanks to the anonymous commenter who added the /b directive to make it better!

Now you have a raw list of filenames, one on each row. You can then bring this into a text editor such as EditPlus, and using the Replace function, you can replace the "Beginning of Line" with "regsvr32.exe ". Save the resultant set of commands as "reggie.bat" and you can then double click on it.

reggie.bat will attempt to register each and every dll in the list. If one doesnt register, you get an error dialog you can dismiss, and if one registers, you get a success dialog that you can also dismiss. By semi - automating the process this way, you can take care of the whole deal in less than a minute.

Fire up Visual Studio 2005, choose Project - Properties, and -- voila! it's fixed.

Here is a sample list:

===============%<=================================
regsvr32.exe cmddef.dll
regsvr32.exe compluslm.dll
regsvr32.exe CrystalDecisions.VSDesigner.dll
regsvr32.exe csformatui.dll
regsvr32.exe custsat.dll
regsvr32.exe dbghelp.dll
regsvr32.exe DevCfg.dll
regsvr32.exe Dip.dll
regsvr32.exe ExtWizrd.dll
regsvr32.exe ExtWizrd7.dll
regsvr32.exe IndigoTemplateGenerator.dll
regsvr32.exe Microsoft.CompactFramework.Design.Data.dll
regsvr32.exe Microsoft.Data.ConnectionUI.Dialog.dll
regsvr32.exe Microsoft.Data.ConnectionUI.dll
regsvr32.exe Microsoft.SqlServerCe.Client.dll
regsvr32.exe Microsoft.VisualBasic.UpgradeEngineInterface.Dll
regsvr32.exe Microsoft.VisualBasic.UpgradeSnippet.Dll
regsvr32.exe Microsoft.VisualBasic.UpgradeWizard.Dll
regsvr32.exe Microsoft.VisualJ.UpgradeEngineInterface.dll
regsvr32.exe Microsoft.VisualJava.UpgradeWizard.DLL
regsvr32.exe Microsoft.VisualJSharp.PropertyPages.dll
regsvr32.exe Microsoft.VisualStudio.ConfigurationUI.dll
regsvr32.exe Microsoft.VisualStudio.Converters.Interop.dll
regsvr32.exe Microsoft.VisualStudio.CSharp.Options.dll
regsvr32.exe Microsoft.VisualStudio.CSharp.Services.Language.dll
regsvr32.exe Microsoft.VisualStudio.Data.dll
regsvr32.exe Microsoft.VisualStudio.Data.Interop.dll
regsvr32.exe Microsoft.VisualStudio.DataTools.dll
regsvr32.exe Microsoft.VisualStudio.DataTools.Interop.dll
regsvr32.exe Microsoft.VisualStudio.Debugger.dll
regsvr32.exe Microsoft.VisualStudio.DeployWizard.Dll
regsvr32.exe Microsoft.VisualStudio.ExportTemplate.dll
regsvr32.exe Microsoft.VisualStudio.HostingProcess.Utilities.dll
regsvr32.exe Microsoft.VisualStudio.HostingProcess.Utilities.Sync.dll
regsvr32.exe Microsoft.VisualStudio.ImportProjectFolderWizard.Dll
regsvr32.exe Microsoft.VisualStudio.JSharp.Options.dll
regsvr32.exe Microsoft.VisualStudio.ObjectTestBench.dll
regsvr32.exe Microsoft.VisualStudio.ProjectConverters.DLL
regsvr32.exe Microsoft.VisualStudio.QualityTools.Wizard.TestProjectWizards.dll
regsvr32.exe Microsoft.VisualStudio.TemplateWizard.dll
regsvr32.exe Microsoft.VisualStudio.ToolBoxControlInstaller.dll
regsvr32.exe Microsoft.VisualStudio.VC.DLL
regsvr32.exe Microsoft.VisualStudio.vspBatchParser.dll
regsvr32.exe Microsoft.VisualStudio.vspConnectionInfo.dll
regsvr32.exe Microsoft.VisualStudio.VSPEnumerator.dll
regsvr32.exe Microsoft.VisualStudio.vspGridControl.dll
regsvr32.exe Microsoft.VisualStudio.vspManagementUI.dll
regsvr32.exe Microsoft.VisualStudio.vspRegSvrEnum.dll
regsvr32.exe Microsoft.VisualStudio.vspServiceBrokerEnum.dll
regsvr32.exe Microsoft.VisualStudio.vspSmo.dll
regsvr32.exe Microsoft.VisualStudio.vspSmoEnum.dll
regsvr32.exe Microsoft.VisualStudio.vspSqlEnum.dll
regsvr32.exe Microsoft.VisualStudio.vspSqlTDiagM.dll
regsvr32.exe Microsoft.VisualStudio.vspWmiEnum.dll
regsvr32.exe Microsoft.VisualStudio.Web.Application.dll
regsvr32.exe Microsoft.VisualStudio.Web.dll
regsvr32.exe Microsoft.VisualStudio.XmlDesigner.dll
regsvr32.exe Microsoft.VSDesigner.Management.dll
regsvr32.exe Microsoft.WebPublisher.dll
regsvr32.exe Microsoft.WizardFramework.dll
regsvr32.exe Microsoft.WizardFrameworkVS.dll
regsvr32.exe msdis150.dll
regsvr32.exe msenc80.dll
regsvr32.exe msenv.dll
regsvr32.exe msenvmnu.dll
regsvr32.exe msobj80.dll
regsvr32.exe mspdb80.dll
regsvr32.exe mspdbcore.dll
regsvr32.exe msvb7.dll
regsvr32.exe ProjectAggregator.dll
regsvr32.exe ProjectAggregator2.dll
regsvr32.exe ProjWiz.dll
regsvr32.exe RequiredPermissions.dll
regsvr32.exe sqlceca30.dll
regsvr32.exe sqlcecompact30.dll
regsvr32.exe sqlceer30en.dll
regsvr32.exe sqlceme30.dll
regsvr32.exe sqlceoledb30.dll
regsvr32.exe sqlceqp30.dll
regsvr32.exe sqlcese30.dll
regsvr32.exe srcsrv.dll
regsvr32.exe symsrv.dll
regsvr32.exe System.Data.SqlServerCe.dll
regsvr32.exe vb7to8DL.dll
regsvr32.exe VJSFormatUI.dll
regsvr32.exe VsAssert.dll
regsvr32.exe VSConvertersPackage.dll
regsvr32.exe vslog.dll
regsvr32.exe vsmacros.dll
regsvr32.exe VSPolicy.dll
regsvr32.exe vssln.dll
regsvr32.exe vstlbinf.dll
regsvr32.exe VsWizard.dll
regsvr32.exe WinFxBrowserApplicationTemplateWizard.dll
regsvr32.exe WinFxCustomControlTemplateWizard.dll
===============%<=================================