For the past month or so, whenever I tried to add a control to my Visual Studio Toolbox, the IDE would shut itself down.  My solution, of course, was to avoid adding tools to my Toolbox.

Finally I decided that I needed to do something, ahem, a little smarter.  The specific problem occurred when I tried to use the Context Menu's "Choose Items..." option on my toolbox.   It turns out that the Power Commands (when did I install that?) has a conflict with VS 2008.  This apparently can also mess up the class viewer in Visual Studio 2008.  There are two work-arounds for this.   The first is to hack a config file for your IDE settings.   That solution can be found here: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vssetup/thread/e2434065-9921-4861-b914-9cc9d6c55553/

Unfortunately this didn't work for me.  The second work-around is simply to uninstall the Power Commands.  If you go into Add/Remove Programs, it is listed as PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2008.

Oddly enough, Add or Remove Programs says I used this particular tool frequently, even though I'm not exactly sure of how I used it.