Yesterday I combined two separate VS 2008 solutions into one mega-solution with 16 total projects.  It seemed to run fine (and why shouldn’t it?) but this morning, opening the same solution after a reboot, I get the following:

Microsoft Visual Studio has encountered an exception and needs to close.

Clicking through to the debugger, I get:

Unhandled exception at 0×76cab09e in devenv.exe: 0xE0434F4D: 0xe0434f4d.

At first I had flashbacks to the bad old days of overloaded IDEs and started removing projects directly from the .sln file using Notepad.  No luck, even after a reboot.

Then I tried to open individual .csproj projects in the editor.  Strangely, each time I tried, this, the entire .sln would try to reopen, with the same terrible result.

This led a little light to go off in my head – what would tie the .csproj and .sln together from the .csproj side of things?  SOURCE CONTROL.  I’m running TortoiseSVN with the VisualSVN plugin.  I used a nifty registry key hack to recursively delete all the .svn directories, which – voilà – allows me to open the solution just fine.

For the moment I’m off source control, but I can work.  I’ll re-add to source control today when I’m done, but I’m crunching for a deadline tomorrow and need to get some bits behind me.