Visual Studio 2017 hangs at “initializing templates…”

0
votes

This is a brand new installation of VS2017 (latest version at the time of writing - 15.1 (26403.0)) on a fresh installation of Windows (Windows 10 Enterprise 64-bit) with no extensions or addons included yet. When going to File New Project VS simply sits at 'initializing templates...'. I've waited for twenty minutes before having to force quit the application.

I have tried the command line argument for devenv /installvstemplates which does not help.

Any help is appreciated, let me know if you need any additional info.

Update

I continued troubleshooting the issue. I ran VS as administrator with logging and noticed that these are the final logged entries when attempting to load templates:

  • Found templates with duplicate template ids at "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Professional\Common7\IDE\ProjectTemplates\CSharp\Windows\1033\ClassLibrary_WorkerRole.vstemplate" and "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Professional\Common7\IDE\ProjectTemplates\CSharp\Windows\1033\ClassLibrary\csClassLibrary.vstemplate"
  • Found templates with duplicate template ids at "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Professional\Common7\IDE\ProjectTemplates\CSharp\1033\SharedProject\SharedProject.vstemplate" and "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Professional\Common7\IDE\ProjectTemplates\CSharp\Windows\1033\SharedProject\SharedProject.vstemplate"
  • Found templates with duplicate template ids at "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Professional\Common7\IDE\ProjectTemplates\VisualBasic\Windows\1033\ClassLibrary_WorkerRole.vstemplate" and "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Professional\Common7\IDE\ProjectTemplates\VisualBasic\Windows\1033\ClassLibrary\classlibrary.vstemplate"
  • Error! Unable to access file (%USER%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\VisualStudio\15.0_ea1722b9\ProjectTemplatesCache\cache.bin)

Even though this was a fresh install on a clean system I did attempt an uninstall and reinstall of VS2017 which did not work. I even selected less options in an attempt to mitigate the duplicate template ID warnings.

1
windowsvisual-studio-2017

1 Answers

0
votes

I ended up having to uninstall VS 2017 again. Uninstall Windows 10 SDK (of which I had two versions for some reason). Run VS 2017 installer as administrator.

This time it installed and completed with warnings, the warning was that it did not install the .Net Core SDK because it says I already have a version, though I don't see it. It's possible I'll have to deal with this later as there may be a hung registry key.

Still, I loaded up VS 2017 and the templates initialized immediately. So this problem is resolved.