I recently got a strange error in Visual Studio 2008 which prevents Visual Studio 2008 from starting: "The application data folder for Visual Studio could not be created.", with only a Close button on the message box. What makes this weird is that it happens only when I use my Administrator account, and not my regular user account -- counterintuitive, because at first it appears to be a permissions problem.
After searching the net for a solution I've found a plethora of blog posts encountering the same problem, with various solutions, but Quantboy's "Visual Studio 2.0 startup error" pointed me at the right direction:
I googled the message- and found that the key to this problem is by changing the following registry key entry (like some everyday user’s going to be able to find this)
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders
I checked the value for this entry in my Admin account and this is what I found:
I compared this with my user account, and this is the correct value, which I applied to the Admin account. I was then able to run Visual Studio 2008 normally:
Consequently I found out that it also prevents Firefox from starting up; during the time I was having these errors I can't open FF either, but after the fix FF starts normally. I don't know what hotfix or what not causes this error, however.
