Repairing Visual Studio .NET 2005
If
you had installed Visual Studio .NET 2005 Beta1, you may run into
problems using the final release (or the Beta2). More specifically, the
IDE may refuse to load the “Common IDE Package” at startup, or it may
be unable to show up the Windows Forms designer for instance. Some
messages you may encounter may resemble this one:
Package Load Failure
Package 'Visual Studio Common IDE Package' has failed to load or
properly ( GUID = {6E87CFAD-6C05-4ADF-9CD7-3B7943875B7C} ). Please
contact package vendor for assistance. Application restart is
recommended, due to possible environment corruption. Would you like to
disable loading this package in the future? You may use 'devenv.exe
/resetskippkgs' to re-enable package loading
For this category of problems, there exists the Visual Studio troubleshooting tool (gracefully provided by Aaron Stebner)
which can be used to clean all the old stuff that was left on your hard
drive by Beta1 release of Visual Studio and thus fully enables Visual
Studio .NET 2005.
NB : this tool should also work if you encounter problems with an Express edition of Visual Studio
The tool is available for download here: http://astebner.sts.winisp.net/Tools/ttool.zip
And the article accompanying it: http://blogs.msdn.com/astebner/archive/2005/11/09/491118.aspx