VS2005 Unable to Complete Operation

This irritating dialog box when trying to debug a project in Visual Studio 2005 is one of those things that you just get used to. When it reared its ugly head this morning I realised that perhaps there were folks out there who were stumped by this.

I am not sure of the reasons for this but in order to debug your application VS creates two files in the bin > debug folder for your project. These will both end with vshost.exe and vshost.exe.config and will be prefixed by your project name. For some reason sometimes these files become corrupt and the VS gives the helpful dialog message above if you attempt to debug.

You need to shut down VS2005 and manually delete these 2 files. They will be recreated as soon as you try to debug again. You have to shut down VS2005 as it retains a file lock on these from when you tried to debug and so you will not be able to delete them unless you shut down the application.

Hope this helps someone out there trying to demystify this ridiculous dialog.