Error: Visual Studio 2012 hangs or crashes when adding new folder in Windows Store App with Javascript and Html

The not very specific error message from VS2012
A couple of days ago I had the weirdest problem in Visual Studio 2012. I was working on some demo applications, Windows Store Apps, and in JavaScript and Html. But whatever I did I could not create or rename a folder. Whenever I did Visual Studio would hang, and become completely unresponsive until I basically had to open task manager and end the process. This happened without failure each and every time I tried. If I opened the project location I could see that the folder was created (not showing in Visual Studio 2012), but it was empty.
pdat Update didn’t help
First I updated and repaired VS. That didn’t help.
And that is how I learned something new. My husband, he is an IT Pro (worth reading his blog) was quick to open up the Event Viewer.

Under Windows Logs, Application, you can find logs for events.

Aha! The culprit!

Application logs

Under Windows Logs, Application, you can find logs for events. And turns out you get some interesting information, this time enough to actually find the culprit. It was VisualSVN that had problems with the project type- and without notification made VS2012 hang (and then crash). I wasn’t using VisualSVN, but it’s still installed and can cause problems. I uninstalled it directly, I’m mostly using TFS and Github at the moment anyway.

You can’t uninstall directly from VS2012
Notice that it can’t be uninstalled from Visual Studio, and I would restart VS2012 after uninstalling it because it was still there until I restarted.
That basically solved the problem directly, and hopefully it will save you some trouble too. I have a feeling I’ll be checking the Event Viewer more often now :)

Error: Visual Studio 2012 hangs or crashes when adding new folder in Windows Store App with Javascript and Html

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