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How to fix a Document Explorer Unknown Error dialog box that appears when launching the Visual Studio IDE

MSDN Blogs > Aaron Stebner's WebLog > How to fix a Document Explorer Unknown Error dialog box that appears when launching the Visual Studio IDE

How to fix a Document Explorer Unknown Error dialog box that appears when launching the Visual Studio IDE

2 Feb 2006 9:31 PM
  • Comments 5

I heard from a customer who received an error message while trying to install Visual Studio 2005.  The dialog box had the title Document Explorer and the text Unknown error.  The customer pressed OK and the dialog did not cause setup to fail.  However, the same error appeared again when attempting to launch the VS IDE, and pressing OK caused the IDE to exit and be unusable.

It turns out this error can be caused by a product named Icon Packager being installed on the system.  The customer found this MSDN Forum post that described his scenario, and the workaround listed there fixed this error.  I wanted to post a link to it on my blog as well to hopefully make it easier for others to find it.

The workaround is to do one of the following:

  1. Uninstall the Icon Packager product
  2. Unregister one of the Icon Packager DLLs by running regsvr32.exe /u iprepair.dll

 

Comments
  • user
    30 Mar 2006 2:03 PM
    thank you for your help. it works now.
  • Abdullah Can Yucesoy
    5 Apr 2006 11:37 AM
    I'm a university student in Turkey, and started programming a year ago. I installed VSDN 2005 product and saw that f***ing "Unknown error". I tried everything including reinstall, install the  
    express version. Then I read the article you wrote about it and suddenly it started to run. I am appreciating you to find out what the problem is. Thank you...
  • adolfojp
    10 May 2006 12:31 PM
    Thank you so much!

    I had this problem on my computer. In fact, it does not only affect VS but a couple of other apps too.

    I was going to rebuild my system today before I read your article.

    I had suspected IconPackager to be the problem so I uninstalled it, but it didn't solve the problem.

    Running "regsvr32.exe /u iprepair.dll" repaired my computer right away.

    To use VS I had to shut down exlorer.exe and launch VS from the command line and then run explorer.exe again.

    Thanks a million.
  • Mark
    27 May 2006 12:46 PM
    Thank you for saving me a huge headache. I was thinking about a clean format until I came across this.
  • lphmedia » Blog Archive » Microsoft Visual Studio Express Editions
    30 Mar 2007 11:44 AM

    PingBack from http://www.lphmedia.com/blog/?p=11

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