A couple of weeks back I started getting an odd error when I would load a solution in Visual Studio .NET 2003. I was only able to find a few resources about the issue but none of them fixed the problem. I did my own investigation of the issue and found an entirely different solution that I hope will help others that run across this.

When I loaded a solution in Visual Studio .NET and the properties and solution explorer windows were being populated, I was presented with the error "The object is currently in use elsewhere." After clicking "OK" I would get a series of "Invalid Argument" exceptions. Closing Visual Studio also caused a few more of the "Invalid Argument" exceptions. The issue occurred regardless of the type of projects contained in the solution. Even more annoying is that it seemed fairly unpredictable as to when it would occur. The stack trace showed that the exception occured in System.Drawing.dll and originated with system code.

Numerous searches on Google resulted in very few results on the subject. The few articles I found suggested upgrading the display drivers and if that failed to correct the issue, reinstalling Windows! I did upgrade the display drivers but that failed to resolve the issue. Reinstalling Windows seemed too drastic a step and I was only willing to take as a last resort.

Since upgrading the display drivers didn't resolve the issue I needed to think about what I had been doing differently since the problem started popping up. Aside from a couple of system updates I had only installed one piece of software.

I've been using a number of IM applications lately so I decided to look into using one of the composite applications. The first one I tried was Trillian and I had installed it slightly before the issue came up for the first time so I thought it might be the culprit. As I started paying attention to what I was doing it seemed even more likely since it only seemed to occur after Trillian had been running for some time.

I decided to stop using Trillian to see if the issue stopped occurring. Sure enough, since I stopped using Trillian, I haven't seen the issue once. I have since switched to using Gaim and have had no problems with Visual Studio.

5/17/2006 Update

Ten days have passed since I first posted this and I still haven't seen the issue resurface so I'm officially going to say the issue is closed and that Trillian caused it.