I have a weird situation: Visual Studio 2010 will hang up indefinitely on me when opening certain websites. It prompts me for my credentials and loads up much of the project tree, and then just hangs at the “Preparing Solution…” dialog, which just then never goes away. In every case, the status bar of VS says that it is currently loading web.config.
It only happens on some websites, not all, but the websites that do fail, they all open without any problem in Visual Studio 2008. So it almost seems like 2010 is having some sort of problem parsing web.config files under certain circumstances (unless of course that web.config message was just the last file to load and it’s actually crashing on the next step).
I’ve tried disabling all my add-ins and extensions, which did not help.
This turned out to be an extension which needed to be updated. In short, if VS says your extensions need updating, then update them. BEFORE trying to open a project, otherwise you may have problems.