Another workaround for Visual Studio Common IDE Package load failures in Visual Studio 2005

I recently heard from a customer who was running into a Visual Studio Common IDE Package load failure error in Visual Studio 2005.  They tried all of the steps listed in my blog post about how to resolve package load failures caused by previous beta versions of Visual Studio 2005 but did not have any luck.  The customer reported that they found a solution to this problem in the following 2 posts on the MSDN Forums:

I took a look back at the setup for a few of the beta versions of Visual Studio 2005 and the data files for the cleanup tool that I posted in my blog post and found that there were a couple of problematic registry values that the cleanup tool did not remove.  I wanted to post instructions describing how to manually remove these problematic registry values in case anyone else runs into a similar issue:

  1. Close Visual Studio 2005
  2. Click on the Start menu, choose Run, type cmd and click OK
  3. Run the following command in the cmd prompt: reg delete "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MSDN\8.0\Packages\{6E87CFAD-6C05-4adf-9CD7-3B7943875B7C}" /v CodeBase /f
  4. Run the following command in the cmd prompt: reg delete "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MSDN\8.0\Packages\{6E87CFAD-6C05-4adf-9CD7-3B7943875B7C}\SatelliteDll" /f
  5. Restart Visual Studio 2005

Note: if running the above steps on Windows Vista, you will need to use an elevated cmd prompt.  You can open an elevated cmd prompt on Windows Vista by clicking on the Start menu, choosing All Programs, then Accessories, then right-clicking on the Command Prompt item and choosing Run as administrator.

I have also updated the version of the Visual Studio 2005 beta cleanup tool on my file server to include steps to remove the above registry values as well.

Please note that the above issue only affects systems that previously had a beta version of VS 2005 installed.  The registry values listed above are not created by the final version of VS 2005, so unless a beta version was installed at some point in the past, there is no way for those registry values to be created on your system.