So, the "Find" and "Find/Replace" tools aren't an important part of Visual Studio, are they?

I recently installed the RTM of Visual Studio 2008 Professional on my Windows XP x64 machine, leaving Visual Studio 2005 installed, as well, just in case things went awry with the new version. I've been using the early release versions of 2008 for sometime now, and have been impressed with the performance improvements and many of the new features, so I didn't think that I'd have too many problems with or misgivings about the upgrade.

Well, after the install I was working in the IDE and used the trusty Ctrl-F combo to open up the "Find" dialog. Visual Studio 2008 immediately conked on me. Totally conked. I opened it back up and tried Ctrl-F again and it conked again.

At this point I was ready to go back to 2005 (I was pretty disappointed in the much-hyped JavaScript debugging already), but I decided to do a quick Google search first. After performing the search, I ended up on the Visual Studio feedback site at the "Visual Studio 2008 RTM Search Crashes" bug report.

For those of you who aren't into reading bug reports, I'll summarize the contents: If you use more than one monitor and a utility (UltraMon in my case, but could be a utility that comes with your video card or any other third party utility) that helps you manage the multiple monitor setup, Visual Studio 2008 will crash when you open up the "Find" and "Find/Replace" dialog. This bug is apparently not a problem with Visual Studio 2008, but a newly-discovered (or at least newly-publicized) bug in Windows XP x64.

After reading through the multiple posts that were associated with the bug report, it became painfully obvious that I had only two choices: either uninstall my baby UltraMon or go back to using Visual Studio 2005. I didn't even have to think about it; I immediately went back to using 2005 and accepted my fate.

Today I randomly decided to check to see if an update for UltraMon had been released, and lo and behold it had! And talk about lucky - in this newest release (3.01 = beta 2 of 3.0) Realtime Soft decided to take some of the Windows 'hooks' out, meaning that the Windows XP x64 bug that was causing my Visual Studio 2008 Ctrl-F issues was fixed for me immediately!