Visual Studio 2015 installer hangs during install?

Question

I downloaded the full ISO for Visual Studio Ultimate CTP 6. The installation program got to about the 90% mark, gauging by the progress bar, and just stuck there. There was frequent activity from Superfetch, Anti-malware protection, and other background processes, but the progress bar was dead still. Eventually the background task activity subsided after 20 minutes, but the progress bar still wouldn't budge.

CHEAP TRICK: Open a notepad window and position the left edge of it so it perfectly marks the current position of the progress bar. If it the progress bar doesn't move past the left edge of the notepad window in about an hour, it's probably stuck.

Solution 1

This was a case of one of the sub-installers getting stuck during the install and never completing. Unfortunately when this happens, it looks like the master installer never times out the operation. The trick is to open up the Task Manager in detail mode, and look for a sub-installer process that is showing 0% CPU usage and 0% disk usage, indicating it has died. Then just kill that process and the master installation will resume. In my case, the name of the sub-installer was SecondaryInstaller.exe and according to the installation log it happened while it was trying to install some Android SDK components for the cross platform development modules. It had frozen permanently. I killed it and the master installer completed. When I ran Visual Studio it was fine, although I'm guessing I'll have to do some digging on the Android components install problem.

Solution 2

I temporarily disabled my antivirus (AVG) and restarted the install. That fixed it.

Solution 3

The current version of AVG Free antivirus is incompatible with Microsoft Visual Studio 2015.

1. It does not allow Visual Studio to be installed on the computer. It gets stuck at "Creating restore point". Visual Studio installs perfectly when AVG is turned off.

2. Any code compiled in "Release" mode targeting x86 platform/environment (in project properties) does not compile. It compiles successfully when AVG is turned off.

I posted the issues in AVG support forum but no one responded.

Solution 4

Same thing happened to me, and I also tried to terminate secondary process from task manager. Do not do that. It is not a solution, but rather a hack which may cause issues later. In my case, I was not even able to uninstall Visual Studio. I tried both web installation and ISO, same issue.

Here is how it worked finally. I restored my Windows 7 to earliest restore point as possible, when there was nothing installed, so I was sure that there would be no conflicts between the different tools (Java, Android API, etc.)

I started the installation of Visual Studio 2015 Community Release Candidate at 10 p.m. At 7 a.m., it was working on Android API 19-21. A hour later, it was finally preparing Visual Studio.

This means that all you need to do is to actually wait 8 to 9 hours. Don't terminate the secondary installer at risk of breaking your Visual Studio; just wait.

Solution 5

During the installation if you think it has hung (notably during the "Android SDK Setup"), browse to your %temp% directory and order by "Date modified" (descending), there should be a bunch of log files created by the installer.

The one for the "Android SDK Setup" will be named "AndroidSDK_SI.log" (or similar).

Open the file and got to the end of it (Ctrl+End), this should indicate the progress of the current file that is being downloaded.

i.e: "(80%, 349 KiB/s, 99 seconds left)"

Reopening the file, again going to the end, you should see further indication that the download has progressed (or you could just track the modified timestamp of the file [in minutes]).

i.e: "(99%, 351 KiB/s, 1 seconds left)"

Unfortunately, the installer doesn't indicate this progress (it's running in a separate "Java.exe" process, used by the Android SDK).

This seems like a rather long-winded way to check what's happening but does give an indication that the installer hasn't hung and is doing something, albeit very slowly.

View more solutions

Comments

[Robert Oschler]

You make an interesting point that people should note. But I had a similar problem with VS2013 and in that case I did leave it running overnight and it was still hung in the morning. The key in both cases is that the sub-installer showed 0% CPU usage in the Task Manager, indicating it literally was "doing nothing". So perhaps people should leave it overnight, but then, kill it if it's still hung like in my case.

[saba vahid]

but you will not be able to use the visual studio after killing the installer,do something else,run a fresh copy of windows and install it there.

[Robert Oschler]

That was not my experience. After I killed the sub-installer (not the main installer) VS worked properly and so did all child modules it installs.

[CoreyH]

This was it for me. I had a pending restart, hit restart even though the installer was still doing its thing and it loads fine now.

[Jerry Dodge]

Too late... And this is a brand new fresh install of Windows 8.1, no restore points.

[Jerry Dodge]

In my case I'm not even installing Android tools. It got stuck at 99.9% "Windows Phone 8.1 Emulators - ENU"

[Jerry Dodge]

Initially, this did not work for me. I ended the secondary process, and the main one still was stuck. So I cancelled, and that got stuck. Then had to end that process too. Later, next time I rebooted my computer, when I logged in, suddenly the installer opened itself back up and finished, and then gave me a message telling me Setup completed successfully.

[demonplus]

Still have this problem in VS 2015 Professional Release from July 20, killing the process seems to work

[kdelmonte]

Mine waz stuck getting the Windows Phone SDK and killing the SecondaryInstaller.exe fixed it for me.

[Atul Chaudhary]

don't follow this approach it messed up my installtion

[Admin]

I had issue with the Android SDKs not installing because they did not use the proxy server in work. Killing the the java.exe made the installer continue without error.

[Arseni Mourzenko]

Indeed, I confirm that the installation can take hours (actually 11 hours for me on a 8-cores machine with an SSD and 20 GB of RAM for a basic installation, no Android), but ends without the need to terminate any process. Hopefully, I wouldn't have to install Visual Studio 2017; I certainly don't want to keep it installing for a week or two.

[hikalkan]

You're right. I disabled it and it installed. Thank you very much.

[Giorgos Betsos]

I had to completely uninstall AVG. Simply disabling it didn't work for me.

[Rajshekar Reddy]

I check my log file and it says (99%, 73 KiB/s, 0 seconds left) and its the same without any change in the file content and the date modified. Any suggestions what to do? by the way its stuck at Android SDK Setup (API Level 19 and 21)

[Huske]

Actually this is a very good point. AVG Free is messing up other Microsoft products. I had an issue with insanely slow Outlook 2016 until disabling the add-in. Thanks for this tip!

[Abhinaw Sharma]

Great. Thank you. It worked for me. One important thing is to figure out the name of the process which is holding the Visual studio installer. this can be done in Task Manager. Open Task Manager in detail mode--> Go to the "Details" tab--> Right Click the VisualStudio Process-->Click on the "Analyze wait chain". You will see the name of the process which is responsible for the wait. Kill this process and hopefully your installer will proceed quickly. good luck!

[php.exe]

I did that, but repair takes forever too. Should I cancel the repair and repair again?

[php.exe]

Is that with ISO or Internet install?

[Rajshekar Reddy]

It was with internet install.

[RaenirSalazar]

Do you have Windows 10 Technical Preview? I found that when I did the in place upgrade to reinstall Windows 10 that Visual Studio installed just fine.

[DanW]

Got stuck twice - both on SecondaryInstaller. Continued after killing each time

[Jonny]

How do I do that? There's no such Feature on my list.

[Max]

See this link tenforums.com/tutorials/…

[Áxel Costas Pena]

And the exact problem is described here - but Microsoft misunderstands ir and proposes solutions from VS itself but not how to solve it on the installer runtime - social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/vstudio/en-US/…

[Dmitriy Dokshin]

Do not do it. JUST WAIT.

[Fred]

Wow. Still can't believe this actually worked. Put my Surface into flight mode and switched internet back on. The installation completed.

[Rajshekar Reddy]

@Fred Glad to know it was helpful.

[Gigala]

This is odd. I'm not sure if it is a coincidence but it worked for me... Mine was hung at the SDK-Thing during repair.

[rustyx]

Same for me. Disabling AVG didn't work. But what works is - turning on/off wi-fi. That gets a stuck installer going again.

[Quango]

Seriously recommend this fix - I had major problems with VS 2015 Update 1 and 2 - disabling anti-virus (Avast in my case) solved the install issues

[algiogia]

This broke Visual Studio. I had to remove and install it from scratch.

[Vector]

Sometime ago Avg deleted my compiled project files from a c# sockets application. Constantly was getting in my way so I uninstalled it, I left a ticket on AVG support and aparently it was common for it to detect false positives.

[Doan Vu]

I even must remove the AVG and use the Avira instead because the AVG keeps alerting about the URL:Mail virus in the setup file.

[Doan Vu]

yeap, it took me a night. So slow installation.

[Zarepheth]

Noting that the Java process associated with the Android SDK Setup was only receiving a measly 106 KB, once every 2 minutes, (via the Process Explorer I/O graph) I decided to follow this suggestion by suspending my active VPN connection. The VS Setup suddenly went through a bunch of CMD and Java processes and proceeded to the next step.

[Hammad Khan]

I would cuation do not prematurely kill the secondary task, Wait for it at least 30 min, if it still hangs around kill it. I have the same problem of visual Studio 2015 community, failing in the last 10 % and yes there is this secondary installer which got stuck but I got a message for it and killed it but still VS2015 not installed properly.

[David Bridge]

I was thinking of doing this having had it stuck for an hour without moving. Then it moved! Wait but whinge so that they feel it next time. Really is too long and MS should have indicated an approximate time to install when they released it.

[David Bridge]

This is a good idea. (Different response later in this page) stackoverflow.com/a/31004547/1194583

[Qwertie]

In my case it was stuck installing "KB2882822" for 2-3 hours. I don't see the "Analyze wait chain" option (is it a Windows 10 thing?) so I used Sysinternals Process Explorer to see "wusa.exe" was a subprocess of vs_community (which was a subprocess of vs_community). The Properties of wusa said it had used only 0.09 seconds of total CPU time and I found no way to tell what it was waiting for so I killed it. The installer immediately did the next task, and finished soon after with two warnings about "...Azure... package failed"

[HeyHeyJC]

Downvoting a bunch of answers without leaving a comment is, to say the least, unhelpful.

[Lukos]

Even if they are not pending, sometimes WU just starts killing the PC resources for no obvious reason. You can manually stop the service to make it recover.

[noCodeMonkeys]

This worked for me as well. In Windows 10 pro I had 1 instance of Windows installer running and 2 instances of windows installer 32 bit running. I ended the 32 bit processes and the installation resumed.

[mathiass]

I was in the same situation as @Qwertie, where it stuck at installing "KB282822". After checking Task Manager and seeing wusa.exe process not active (0% CPU usage) for almost an hour, I decided to kill the process. The installer finally continued until it finished without errors. So far Visual Studio seems to be launching just fine (without errors). I'm on Windows 7 64-bit, Visual Studio Community 2015.

[Auguste]

I killed the sub installers, the installation is successful. However, when I tried to compile a web site, the debugger is not working. It asks me to repair it.

[AlbatrossCafe]

YES! I was trying to repair My install went from 3+ hours (quit halfway through) to 10 minutes. Safe mode does the trick. It got me to the end of my repair where it finally showed me the real error message I was trying to fix in the first place

[Jon Coombs]

The idea of checking the %TEMP% folder and "tailing" the log file (AndroidPackageSelectorInstall20161207-124701.log in my case) was helpful. I used Notepad++, which makes it easier to detect when the file has changed and reload it. I switched to airplane mode long enough to get this in the file (also java.exe disappeared from Task Manager): "Stopping ADB server succeeded."

[Jon Coombs]

This was helpful to me. I temporarily switched into airplane mode until the log file in %TEMP% reported that "Stopping ADB server succeeded." and Java disappeared from Task Manager. Other things then started showing up in TEMP, so I was glad I hadn't killed any tasks yet.

[Jon Coombs]

Also, search this page's comments for "Analyze wait chain" (or "abhinaw"). That's a handy trick.

[RBT]

@abhinaw task manager tool chain was always showing me its dependency on dwm.exe. Every time I kill it, it will get reborn on its own and then VS installer again got into waiting for it to do something. I had to ultimately kill SecondaryInstaller.exe only as suggested in this post to go past the issue.

[GreenAsJade]

Why the downvote? Is there something wrong with this suggestion?

[Csega]

I don't understand it either. It worked perfectly fine for me. However, there is a downside. This does not solve the upgrade problem. For every upgrade you have to do the same process.

[dodgy_coder]

This is an intentional Microsoft tactic to determine whether or not you are worthy to use Visual Studio 2015. Skills required - high level of patience, StackOverflow, Windows admininstration basics.

[Hussein Salman]

I faced the same problem, and Stopping AVG during installation solved the problem. Thanks!

[Elferone]

That was it for me, but there is no need to kill any processes. Just disable Windows Defender real time protection.

[karlicoss]

This was the only thing that actually helped (I tried cleaning caches, stopping/starting update service, deleting updater folders, etc, etc.). Thanks.

[Fuzzy Logic]

If you kill any of the processes during install, you should run the repair option afterward, from the installer, to fix anything that may not have been properly installed. I had this issue installing VS Build Tools 2017, stuck at 99%. I killed it, reran the installer and it gave me the option to repair. The repair process completed without issue. I assume this is a networking issue. Online installers suck.

[Fuzzy Logic]

If you are waiting 8 or 9 hours and then it completes, the installer is working fine but you have a bad internet connection. Most likely you are on wifi, which tends to get packet errors if the signal is weak or there is interference, causing the data to be re-transmitted many times. Either ditch the dialup or get a wired internet connection.

[Rômulo Tone]

THANK YOU SOOOOOOO MUCH! I lost more than 2 days of work trying to solve the this issue, your comment saved me! I was freaking out!