Spurred largely by a blog post by Brad Abrams, I installed Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio 2005. First, the good news: it seems to fix all the bugs I know about, and adds support for ASP.NET AJAX and (in a separate update) Windows Vista. The bad news: it takes longer to install than the original product, and changes some Visual Studio behavior for the worse, at least on my computer. The long install wasn't a su Spurred largely by a blog post by Brad Abrams, I installed Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio 2005. First, the good news: it seems to fix all the bugs I know about, and adds support for ASP.NET AJAX and (in a separate update) Windows Vista. The bad news: it takes longer to install than the original product, and changes some Visual Studio behavior for the worse, at least on my computer.The long install wasn’t a surprise: it is mentioned in the release notes. It is also explained in some detail in Heath Stewart’s blog, with additional advice in Scott Guthrie’s blog. However, the change in behavior blindsided me.It used to be that my installation of Visual Studio 2005 would start up fairly quickly. If I needed to check the documentation from within Visual Studio, however, I could expect a long delay. I could avoid that delay by launching MSDN Library separately. Now, Visual Studio 2005 takes well over a minute to start, but there’s no significant delay when launching the integrated documentation, unless of course the documentation recently changed and the indexes need to be rebuilt. I have tried to reduce the startup time by uninstalling add-ons, but so far I have had no luck. Starting Visual Studio is now something I do just before heading out to fill my tea mug or visit the men’s room.I have begun some inquiries at Microsoft. They haven’t been able to reproduce the problem, but they’ve had me generate some logs for analysis, and we’re scheduling a remote-help session to pin things down. So far, it looks like we’ve narrowed the problem down to one specific Visual Studio add-in that was incompletely uninstalled; apparently, SP1 handles this specific situation for this particular add-in in a different way than the base product did. If that turns out to be the case, it isn’t a bug that many people will encounter.I’ll let you know how it turns out. If you have experiences (good or bad) to share about Visual Studio 2005 SP1, please let me know about them. Software Development