I don't know what caused it... but somehow I managed to get Visual Studio 2008 in a state where it would crash if I tried rearranging debug and properties windows, etc and then later stopped the debugger. Not only did it crash, but the app hung and would only close if I opened Task Manager and killed the devenv.exe process.
I started hunting and found this
hotfix on MSDN, but then noticed in the comments a nicer solution to try before applying the hotfix. The solution is simple:
- Start debugging
- Window >> Reset Window Layout
- Stop debugging
This worked great for me... your mileage may vary. If it doesn't work, try
downloading the hotfix.