Visual Studio Hangs on Startup While Loading Recent Projects
Published: June 26, 2025 at 1:41:25 PM UTC
Every once in a while, Visual Studio will start hanging on the startup screen while loading the list of recent projects. Once it starts doing so, it tends to keep doing it a lot and you will often have to restart Visual Studio several times, and typically have to wait several minutes between attempts to make progress. This article covers the most likely cause of the problem and how to solve it.
Occasionally, Visual Studio will hang on startup while loading the list of recent projects. Once it starts happening, it often keeps happening a lot, and it can take quite a few attempts to actually manage to get Visual Studio to open.
Once, on a day where I didn't need it urgently on a particular development machine, I just let it hang to see how long it would take while I worked on other machines. When I was about to shut down for the day eight hours later, it was still hanging, so patience does not appear to be a viable option in this case.
The issue is made further annoying by the fact that it seems you need to wait a few minutes between starting Visual Studio up to have a chance of it getting past the issue. If you just keep starting it up again quickly, it will just keep happening. I have on several occasions spent over half an hour just getting Visual Studio to start once it has become afflicted with this. This is obviously not ideal when you're trying to be productive at work.
I have yet to figure out what exactly causes this issue, but fortunately - after doing some research - I have found out a way to reliably solve it when it happens.
The problem appears to be related to Visual Studio's component model cache, which can apparently become corrupted sometimes. What exactly causes the corruption is still a mystery to me, but when it happens, you can just delete it, which solves the problem.
The component model cache is normally located in this folder:
Obviously, you should replace <USERNAME> and <VERSION_AND_INSTANCEID> with your own values. Also remember that the AppData folder is usually hidden, but you can still access it by typing it into the address bar if you don't want to enable display of hidden files and folders.
The ComponentModelCache folder itself can just be deleted or renamed and the next time you start Visual Studio, it will not hang while loading recent projects :-)
Problem solved - but it will probably re-occur sooner or later, so perhaps you'll want to bookmark this post ;-)
Note: This article is published under Dynamics 365, because D365 development is what I typically use Visual Studio for. I believe that the problem covered here is a general issue with Visual Studio and not specific to the D365 plugin, though.