So, the “Find” and “Find/Replace” tools aren’t an important part of Visual
Studio, are they?

I recently installed the RTM of Visual Studio 2008 Professional on my
Windows XP x64 machine, leaving Visual Studio 2005 installed,
as well, just in case things went awry with the new version. I’ve been using the
early release versions of 2008 for sometime now, and have been impressed with
the performance improvements and many of the new features, so I didn’t think
that I’d have too many problems with or misgivings about the upgrade.

Well, after the install I was working in the IDE and used the trusty Ctrl-F
combo to open up the “Find” dialog. Visual Studio 2008 immediately conked on me.
Totally conked. I opened it back up and tried Ctrl-F again and it conked
again.

At this point I was ready to go back to 2005 (I was pretty disappointed in
the much-hyped JavaScript debugging already), but I decided to do a quick Google
search first. After performing the search, I ended up on the Visual Studio
feedback site at the “Visual Studio 2008 RTM Search Crashes” bug report.

For those of you who aren’t into reading bug reports, I’ll summarize the
contents: If you use more than one monitor and a utility (UltraMon in my case,
but could be a utility that comes with your video card or any other third party
utility) that helps you manage the multiple monitor setup, Visual Studio 2008
will crash when you open up the “Find” and “Find/Replace” dialog. This bug is
apparently not a problem with Visual Studio 2008, but a newly-discovered (or at
least newly-publicized) bug in Windows XP x64.

After reading through the multiple posts that were associated with the bug
report, it became painfully obvious that I had only two choices: either
uninstall my baby UltraMon or go back to using Visual Studio 2005. I didn’t even
have to think about it; I immediately went back to using 2005 and accepted my
fate.

Today I randomly decided to check to see if an update for UltraMon had been
released, and lo and behold it had! And talk about lucky – in this newest
release (3.01 = beta 2 of 3.0) Realtime Soft decided to take some of the Windows
‘hooks’ out, meaning that the Windows XP x64 bug that was causing my Visual
Studio 2008 Ctrl-F issues was fixed for me immediately!