Saturday, October 8, 2016

Visual Studio 2015 installation issues ('package did not load ...')

[updated 9oct2016]

I am using VS2015 Community edition and recently decided to apply some updates that VS suggested, as well as add a few more addins.

Once the installation finished, I tried to open the solution I had just been working on, only to receive an error from VS about 'Roaming package did not load'.

I rerun the VS2015 installer and, after a length wait, was told that all was well.
I run VS and received the same error.

I then uninstalled VS (which took quite some time) and then re-installed it, only to have the same error appear.

I tried tricks from the web, like deleting the 
C:\Users\%user%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\VisualStudio\14.0\ComponentModelCache directory, to no effect.

Nothing I tried worked.

I even tried an uninstall with the '-uninstall -force' option, which ended up coming back with an error about 'bad blocks' (can't recall exact message).

All in all, nothing worked.

I then resorted to using the 'Total Uninstaller' tool from MS which removes all previous versions on VS.

After a reboot, I proceeded with a complete re-install of VS2015.

It took its good time to do the blasted install and, not surprisingly, it came up with an error at the end, regarding a problem with VC++ runtimes.

However, It did not say that the install failed, rather that it could not install those runtimes.

It turns out that something that I installed, installed VC++ redistributable v14.0.24215, whereas VS2015 wants v14.0.24210 (32 and 64-bit)

For me in any case, removing my (newer!) version of those runtimes, fixed the problem

I hope this works for you too.


[update:
Important note: Running TotalUninstaller actually made the re-install work better! It became clear that, prior to running this, there were leftovers from previous VS installations that caused this installation to make incorrect assumptions!]

The steps were:
- Unistall VS2015 via vs_community /uninstall
- run TotalUninstaller (Setup.ForcedUninstall.exe)
- reboot (it is windows after all...)
- run VS2015 installer. It now looks like it should! It does a proper, clear installation.



ps: Comments and/or links to this article are most welcome!