Makiwa

The problem
I have just had a couple of days of major hassle with Visual Studio. Starting both VS 2003 and VS 2005 Beta 2 resulted in an almost instant error dialog informing me that there was an “Unknown error”.

Both 2003 and 2005?? I had used them the day before with no problems. It didn’t make sense. I googled my fingers off and troubleshooted my frontal lobes off - but to no avail. Straining wildly at the end of my tether, I decided to uninstall BOTH versions of Visual Studio. It would be painful, but at least it would solve the problem.

My first inkling that the Gods were conspiring against me was 95% of the way through re-installing VS2003 I got - yes, you guessed it - “Unknown error”!!!!! DURING THE @*?&%! INSTALLATION??! When the installation completed it assured me that it had completed successfully “with no errors”. Yeah right! Tried to launch it…..Unknown error. Unknown error. Unknown bloody error.

That was the last straw. I was so annoyed I just felt like killing someone. So I opened Counterstrike: Source. Some poor noob was in for it! Or so I thought. Steam(tm) - which is short for Steaming Pile of Horse Manure(tm) - decided to spend 45 minutes upgrading itself and then would not let me play any Steam game because “another instance” was “already running”. Cool upgrade.

At this point I went to bed.

However, I managed to fall out of bed, hurting my shoulder and knocking over a side-table, which took a chunk out of the wall.

Can there possibly be a happy ending to the story? Yes. When I was googling for a solution to the “Unknown error” the top link gave me a “404 File not found” so I had skipped it. This morning I decided to hack the url to try to get to it and managed to find the original post. The link is here. (Yes, I know I could have just viewed the cached result but for some reason I didn’t think of it at the time)

The solution
The culprit was a file called iprepair.dll from Stardock Icon Packager. All I needed to do was unregister it…

regsvr32 /u iprepair.dll

I have re-installed both versions of Visual Studio and they work just fine. All I need to do now is patch my shoulder and the bedroom wall.

If you have this “Unknown error” problem and you have never installed Stardock Icon Packager then I am sorry, the solution is not here. You may want to look here: www.google.com.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 27th, 2005 at 22:54 and is filed under Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.