Visual Studio 2008 help painfully slow to start up

Question

I work on C# projects in Visual Studio 2008 IDE.  If I press the F1 key or select help from the menu, it takes just under a minute for the help system to load.  The hard disk churns during this 55 or so seconds before the help window appears and if I try to access the IDE during this churning I get the application busy message box and I can't do anything until the start up is complete.  One the help system is loaded moving around in it isn't bad but waiting for it to start up is frustrating.

My machine is not a burner (3GHz Pentium4 HT  with 3 GB or RAM) but this seems a little ridiculous.  Is anyone else seeing this and is there some kind of fix for it?

Answer 1

Dexplore can take several minutes to start after you have installed anything that might have modified the documentation namespace including any class libraries or plugins.  A minute consistently does seem a little high.  Are you sure AV isn't getting in your way?  Alternatively do you have VS set to grab documentation from online?  If so then you are likely stalling while it connects.

Personally I have disabled F1 in VS because I got tired of starting it accidentally.  I have a shortcut in the tools that I can use if I need it.  I have also disabled online content from MSDN to speed things up.

Michael Taylor - 5/19/09
http://p3net.mvps.org

Answer 2

The only thing I've added is Visual Studio Power commands and that was a couple of months ago.  Could that be causing permanent slowdown?

How do you disable online content from MSDN?  Maybe that would help.

Thanks,
Joe

Answer 3

Power commands shouldn't cause a slowdown.

Tools\Options -> Help\Online

Michael Taylor - 5/19/09
http://p3net.mvps.org

Answer 4

Power commands shouldn't cause a slowdown.

Tools\Options -> Help\Online

Michael Taylor - 5/19/09
http://p3net.mvps.org

I have try to set it out, I start up visual studio 8 very fast,that is good things , thanks you...ty...