Recently I faced a situation where a software developer using Visual Studio 2008 wasn't able to do virtually anything in database projects.
It was possible to create a new database project, but on many operations, including Import Database Schema and New Schema Comparison an error message stating Object reference not set to an instance of an object was shown.
I was told that reinstall of Visual Studio doesn't help. Also System Restore made situation only worse.
Accidentally it was discovered that this is a per-user problem (only developers account was affected). After some research I discovered that most likely some of Visual Studio components have had some problems previously so they were skipped from loading.
So a simple "%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe" /ResetSkipPkgs in Command Prompt of developers account solved this problem.
Most likely this method (resetting skipped packages) can also solve some other "cryptic" per-user problems of Visual Studio 2008.
Posted on 2008.10.05. 19:09

Anonymous at 2009.01.22. 14:22
Hi Davis,

i met the same problem, but after trying your solution, mine still donesn't work, coule you please help me with further infomation please?

yooyuu@126.com

Davis at 2009.01.25. 02:10
You may try one more destructive method - delete these two registry keys:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VSCommon

WARNING! This will delete virtually all your Visual Studio settings.
But this often helps with weird MS Visual Studio problems, that affect only one specific user.

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