Why does it take sooo long to load my solution in Visual Studio?

I found a solution myself and I wanted to share it here, hoping that it might save someone quite a few hours of research and staring at the “Preparing solution…” dialog.

When inspecting the devenv.exe process with Process Monitor, I found out that it is pretty busy with accessing the .svn directory. Here is what I did (and this somehow solved the problem):

1. Kill Visual Studio
2. Open Visual Studio without loading a solution
3. Disable AnkhSvn as Source Control plugin (Tools->Options->Source Control->Plug-in Selection->None)
4. Disable “Document Well 2010 Plus” (VS2010) or “Custom Document Well” (VS2012) in Productivity Power Tools (Tools->Options->Productivity Power Tools) – I read that somewhere and it might have helped as well…
5. Close Visual Studio
6. Delete the solution’s *.suo file. This is located in the same folder as the solution itself. NOTE: You will lose several settings for your solution, like currently opened files, breakpoints, bookmarks, current solution configuration & platform (e.g. Debug x86) etc.
7. Restart Visual Studio
8. Load the solution – it was much faster now!
9. Close Visual Studio
10. Open Visual Studio without loading a solution
11. Re-enable AnkhSvn and the “Document Well”
12. Restart Visual Studio
13. Open the solution – it was still loaded in seconds!

I do not know which of these steps actually solved the problem. Probably, not all these steps are required, but I did not want to reproduce the problem to find out which steps may be omitted. 🙂