Visual Studio has been around for so long and has gone through so many changes in recent years to accommodate different technologies that quite often it gets bogged down in it’s own wait.  In the VS2005 release a little toolbar notification bubble was added to indicate that Visual Studio was still thinking – useless and almost as annoying as Clippy.  Essentially Visual Studio has become so bloated that it takes up more memory and other resources than most applications developers will build.

Unfortunately if you just want to open a single file or a project just to look something up you need to load up the entire Visual Studio IDE.  Here’s a tip from Dr Neil at nsquared solutions: Install the express skus (eg Visual Basic 2008 Express, Visual C# 2008 Express or Visual Web Developer 2008 Express) and use those to open these files.  These skus can be installed alongside the professional version and are much lighter wait.