Periodically, I encounter an annoying but not fatal problem with Microsoft Visual Studio: the help takes a long time to display the first time I launch it in a session. Sometimes I expect this to happen, because of having recently installed an add-on to Visual Studio that needs to merge its help contents. Other times, it is unexpected behavior. Recently, it started happening again every day, and I foun Periodically, I encounter an annoying but not fatal problem with Microsoft Visual Studio: the help takes a long time to display the first time I launch it in a session. Sometimes I expect this to happen, because of having recently installed an add-on to Visual Studio that needs to merge its help contents. Other times, it is unexpected behavior.Recently, it started happening again every day, and I found myself avoiding launching help from Visual Studio: if I remembered, I would launch the MSDN help browser or help for a specific product from the Windows Start menu. If I forgot and pressed F1 or Ctrl-Alt-F1 in Visual Studio, I’d moan aloud and go refill my tea mug.Finally, I got fed up and asked for assistance from the folks who helped me fix the slow Visual Studio (VS) loading problem I told you about on January 15th. They didn’t know how to fix this, but they passed the problem along to the program manager responsible for what they call Document Explorer. What I told him to narrow the problem down was this: Is this VS 2005 SP1? Yes. What keyword are you searching for? Contents, the simplest case, still seems long. Do you have internal or external help configured? External. Are you loading help locally or off the web? Local first, then online. How long exactly is it taking? 45 seconds. I expect it to be more like 5 seconds, based on the load time for MSDN from Windows. Do you get the 45 second delay every time you press Ctrl-Alt-F1, or just the first time Document Explorer loads? Just the first time. Does it continue to take this long if you configure help for online first?That turned out to be the money question. I did the experiment of switching help to “online first.” I closed VS, then reloaded it, and Document Explorer loaded in under 5 seconds. Then I tried switching back to “local first.” I closed VS, then reloaded it, and Document Explorer still loaded in under 5 seconds. Brilliant! Our theory is that Document Explorer was doing a merge with the new add-on content every time, erroneously, and that the flag to merge the new content wasn’t gettting cleared. Whatever the problem was, switching to “online first” made it go away and stay away. I don’t know if that’ll be useful to anyone else, but it helped me. Software Development