Visual Studio crashed while adding Toolbox items

I’d like to share my recent experience working in Visual Studio 2008. The other day I was working on a program in Visual Studio 2008 and had to update the Toolbox with some items. When I tried to add some items to the Toolbox Visual Studio quit unexpectedly. I was aghast as there was no error message or indication of reason(s) for the crash. I thought that perhaps it was simply a coincidence that Visual Studio quit when I tried to add items to the Toolbox. Repeated attempts to add items ( I also tried to add different items thinking that perhaps there was something wrong with the items I was trying to add to the Toolbox) to the Toolbox resulted in Visual Studio crashing each and every time. Since there was no error message I decided to check the event viewer and I found the following error message in the application event logs.

After exhausting all my options in troubleshooting this issue I turned my attention to the internet. After a little bit of research I found out that PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2008 may be the culprit. I checked to see if PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2008 was installed on my computer and it was installed on my computer. I uninstalled PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2008 and lo and behold that fixed the issue. I was once again able to add items to Visual Studio Toolbox.

PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2008 is a great add-on for Visual Studio that has many useful features for a developer but to me this is a critical issue that must be fixed otherwise one cannot use the Toolbox. So if you have PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2008 please be aware that you may not be able to add any items to the Toolbox. You have to uninstall it using Add/Remove programs to be able to add items to the Toolbox.